hayvan

u/hayvan@piefed.world
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Soviets did a lot to harm Eastern Block tech. Bulgarian Pravetz was a clone of Apple ][. Nothing impressive but cheap, functional, domestically produced. Can't really be exported towards west due to blatant IP violations, but the production capabilities were good enough to produce and export hard drives.

Except the trade deal with Britain was blocked by Soviets because it was seen as a security threat, and an industry died in its infancy.

I'm not sure about GBA architecture specifically, but earlier systems just plugged those into the system bus directly.

According to here the ROM is directly on the bus, but since ROMs are slower than RAM, there is a cache-like buffer in between. But it's not a separate IO bus, it's still the memory-mapped system bus.

Today's equivalent of a GBA cartridge would be a special read-only DDR5 stick that you plug into your mainboard, and the game runs directly from the installed memory. They don't need loading, they don't need booting at all, when you power up it is already in the memory.

Actually you don't even stream from the cartridge. The cartridge connector is part of the system bus. The equivalent of the CPU-RAM connection on the current motherboards. When you insert a cartridge, the ROM chips inside the cartridge becomes part of your system memory. So you literally run it directly from the cartridge. Imagine today's games came inside RAM sticks, and inserting them into DDR5 slots.