Can you get GBA games to run on a SNES? Or vice versa?

benol · Post by **benol** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 5:11 pm

I was wondering if it's possible. It probably isn't, but it would Ãœber pwn if you can.

Chwoka · Post by **Chwoka** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 5:38 pm

Considering the GBA was made YEARS after the SNES' development cycle ended, no. NBut you can play B&W GB games on it with a Super Gameboy adapter.

Harshboy · Post by **Harshboy** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 5:59 pm

You CAN play SNES games on the GBA

dudex77 · Post by **dudex77** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 6:19 pm

Chwoka wrote:Considering the GBA was made YEARS after the SNES' development cycle ended, no. NBut you can play B&W GB games on it with a Super Gameboy adapter.

im sorry but did that really need to be stated and harshboy the snes emu for the gba is slow as hell and is no good for anything but rpgs

Harshboy · Post by **Harshboy** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 6:37 pm

You never asked if it was fast

hcmtnbiker · Post by **hcmtnbiker** » Sun Dec 24, 2006 6:55 pm

dudex77 wrote:im sorry but did that really need to be stated and harshboy the snes emu for the gba is slow as hell and is no good for anything but rpgs

Actually the SNES emulator isnt slow for most stuff, the problem i have with it is the NTSC vs GBA aspect ratios.

dudex77 · Post by **dudex77** » Mon Dec 25, 2006 5:52 am

hcmtnbiker wrote:
dudex77 wrote:im sorry but did that really need to be stated and harshboy the snes emu for the gba is slow as hell and is no good for anything but rpgs
Actually the SNES emulator isnt slow for most stuff, the problem i have with it is the NTSC vs GBA aspect ratios.

liar what emu are you using? all the ones ive tried have been close to unplayable and really impracticle considering the lack of buttons

sammy · Post by **sammy** » Tue Dec 26, 2006 1:23 pm

Most emulators for gba are way too slow. Check out some vids at youtube to see for yourself.

And playing gba games on a snes is impossible cause the gba can do tons of things the snes can't.

Retromaster · Post by **Retromaster** » Tue Dec 26, 2006 1:54 pm

the SNES is 16 bit and the GBA is 32 bit, so it won't work.

hcmtnbiker · Post by **hcmtnbiker** » Wed Dec 27, 2006 1:54 pm

Retromaster wrote:the SNES is 16 bit and the GBA is 32 bit, so it won't work.

Are you kidding me? My computer is an x86(32 bit) as well and guess what it emulates SNES pretty well.

Retromaster · Post by **Retromaster** » Wed Dec 27, 2006 2:11 pm

I meant that you couldn't just wire up a cart slot and stick it in the SNES and expect it to work. it has different hardware.

EDIT If you're into programming, you could probably get low bandwidth and low graphic games such as the classic nes series for gba to work, but it would be hard.

Gump-in-space · Post by **Gump-in-space** » Wed Dec 27, 2006 8:49 pm

GBA on SNES is impossible. The "bit" of a system is determined by the length of the words that the processer uses. A word is a bunch of bits together to form data. A bit is a 1 or 0.

GBA would look like this: 10011011101001000101001011010110 100100...
While SNES can only process: 001011010011001110 1001110100101110...

So GBA carts are too complicated for the SNES to understand.

soundwave · Post by **soundwave** » Wed Dec 27, 2006 11:39 pm

hcmtnbiker wrote:
Retromaster wrote:the SNES is 16 bit and the GBA is 32 bit, so it won't work.
Are you kidding me? My computer is an x86(32 bit) as well and guess what it emulates SNES pretty well.

That computer probably clocks at ~2GHz at the minimum, take a swing at the clock speeds of SNES and GBA?

sammy · Post by **sammy** » Thu Dec 28, 2006 8:29 am

Clock speed has nothing to do with the compatibility of these games. It just WON'T work.

You can't play gba games on a snes because you just can't. It's like trying to play Blu-Ray's on a regular DVD player. You can't play those on a regular dvd player but you can play normal dvd's on a blu-ray player.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Thu Dec 28, 2006 10:30 am

Ok time to explain way the SNES and the GBA are not compatible. The SNES uses a 65c816 CPU, a 16bit chip. Now the GBA uses an ARM 7 variation, as pointed out a 32bit chip. SNES games that are played on the GBA are ports, the code has be rewritten to work on the GBA's hardware. There is no way you could back-port games from the GBA to the SNES for the simple fact that the SNES' CPU is slow enough running it's own games it'd be insanely slow having a 16bit CPU run 32bit code. I'm aware you can overclock the SNES up to double it's default speed, however that doesn't change the fact that you run code that's twice the size the chip is designed to run it's going to be slow no matter what.

Now that that is explained I think this discussion can come to an end.

Sources of information:
GBA information
SNES information