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sd card speed

Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 1:59 pm
by Slab of concrete
i was wondering if the speed of the sd card effects game play? say if i get a faster sd card would it effect those games that have choppy cutscenes and sound problems?

Re: sd card speed

Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 2:03 pm
by liquitt
the gamecube's EXI port has a max speed of about 3 mb/s (in theory, usable are a lot less, like 1.5 mb/s)
early generation sd cards have a read speed of 3.6 mb/s, nowadays it's waaaaay fast...but still limited by the EXI

there is infact one thing that affects gameplay or the fact if a game even boots or not: quality. i was using a Transcend cheapss sd card and it didnt work. bought a sandisk and voila :)

Re: sd card speed

Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 2:07 pm
by KirovAir
Slab of concrete wrote:i was wondering if the speed of the sd card effects game play? say if i get a faster sd card would it effect those games that have choppy cutscenes and sound problems?
Not noticable I guess. If it boots, then you're fine, as the max. used speed of the EXI port is ~1.2mb/s.
See:
emu_kidid wrote:in theory the EXI bus has 3mb/s transfer rate using DMA. We cannot use DMA because of the hardware bug that exists on the EXI bus with the shift register destroying data. So instead we use PIO (Polled I/O) which is a lot slower, around the 1.2mb/s mark.
Only the SD-card access times might improve some small load-'bugs'. But yet again, not really noticeable, because next to access time (max. a few miliseconds) every SD card nowadays will get a read speed higher than the current 1.2mb/s.

Re: sd card speed

Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 9:45 pm
by kevstah2004
Swiss should report the class rating for you card or maximum mhz speed, some cheaper cards are only 25mhz.