On Wed February 8 2006 05:23, Jim Bagley wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, how much memory has you basic stamp
> got? as if your going to program the gba with something to
> show output in text on GBA, cos for starters, your gonna need
> a font, and they don't come cheap memory wise, gba's smallest
> font bpp is 4, so your gonna have to have code to convert 1bit
> bitmap font to 4bit, and code it to read data from stamp, not
> to mention the stamps own code to store the gba code and send
> it to gba, and finally your code for the project to create the
> data and send to gba :) unless your putting all that on an
> external eeprom to the stamp? :)

Well, an 8x8 bitmap font needs 1k per bit of depth, so he'd need
4k for the font. That eliminates the two starter kits (which
have 256 bytes of EEPROM for the series 1, 2K for the series 2)
but all the rest have at least 16k (though it looks like they're
bankswitched, which I guess could make it complicated) and as
you say, there's always external EEPROMs.

I'd think the rest of it wouldn't be that hard to fit into 16k,
let alone 32. I could even imagine writing some kind of minimal
"display server" type of program and sending it to the GBA to
just display what the stamp sent it over the link port...
handling graphics primitives, simple text display, etc. But I
don't know how useful it'd be for games (I know that's not what
the original poster wanted it for anyway.)

Rob