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[okimpala]

Ok!

So, I just got a Supercard and was pretty disappointed by the slowdown of many GBA games. It seems that DS games shouldn't have this slowdown because they can be read directly from (fast) SD cards. (I can't test this since I don't have a Passme). Why isn't it possible to read GBA ROMS in some way directly from the SD memory ignoring the slow memory of the SC? Can I still keep my hopes up for such a firmware update or is it simply impossible?

And in that case, what are the best ways of speeding up those GBA ROMS? Thanks in advance for your help! 

[Sonny_Jim]

The speed of the SD card is several times slower than reading from GBA memory on the Supercard.  There are a few ways to get around this, but off the top of my head I can't remember.  Have a good search of some forums for GBA supercard slowdown.

[Devil_Spawn]

the 'slow' memory is far faster than an sd card

-Devil Spawn

[Perseid]

There are a few tricks I've seen on some forums and I unfortunately don't remember where and even they only kind of work for a few games. There really is no way to get all games working at speed on an SC SD.

[dai_uk]

There is a fast restart patcher but if you want to play games like mario kart you're out of luck.

80% of gba games run full speed.

If you want full speed try an EZ-IV or if you have a slot 1 card the Ez-5 3 in 1, they're about the cheapest full speed option but have no clock (pokemon can be patched but it won't be 100% like the original)

[dantheman]

Indeed, it has to do with the way the games run.  The GBA has very little RAM (only 256 kb), so it calls assets directly from the cartridge itself, which must respond incredibly quickly.  This is why traditional GBA flash carts use NOR-based memory, which is slow to write to but very quick to read from.  The Supercard and M3 copy the games from the relatively slow NAND-based CF/SD card into faster RAM to remedy this.  The DS loads assets from the cartridge into its 4 MB of RAM before execution, so DS games can be read directly from the NAND-based CF/SD card. 

For more info, http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/NAND_and_NOR and http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/Block_device would be good reads.

For some info on a few methods you can try to use to speed up some GBA games, check out http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/SupercardGBASlowdowns which has mirror links to the downloads.