Hacking EZ OMEGA Power consumption optimization result

[SegaSnatcher]

Fantastic results. Thats definitely a pretty big improvement.

 

[Drumaster]

Hi!

Here are the results of my battery testing:

Console: Game Boy Micro Famicom Edition
Battery used: Brand new Patona 450mAh fully charged
Cart tested: EZ-Flash Omega with 1GB Sandisk formatted in FAT16/32K
Kernel/Firmware: Kernel T3 firmware 5 with RTC OFF
Step to reproduce:
- Top Gear Rally (clean US rom) launched in clean mode without doing anything, letting the demo play by itself continuously until the console totally turns off
- sound on speaker at about 2/3 volume
- screen brightness on 3rd step out of 5
Result: 4h06min

Console: Game Boy Micro Famicom Edition
Battery used: Brand new Patona 450mAh fully charged
Cart tested: SuperCard MiniSD
Kernel/Firmware: Firmware 1.85 (last one)
Step to reproduce:
- Top Gear Rally (US patched rom) launched without doing anything, letting the demo play by itself continuously until the console totally turns off
- sound on speaker at about 2/3 volume
- screen brightness on 3rd step out of 5
Result: 4h36min

Console: Game Boy Micro Famicom Edition
Battery used: Brand new Patona 450mAh fully charged
Cart tested: Original Top Gear Rally euro cartridge
Kernel/Firmware: Kernel T3 firmware 5 with RTC OFF
Step to reproduce:
- Top Gear Rally launched from original cartridge without doing anything, letting the demo play by itself continuously until the console totally turns off
- sound on speaker at about 2/3 volume
- screen brightness on 3rd step out of 5
Result: 7h46min

So yeah, the Omega, even with the last power consumption optimizations, drains the battery almost twice faster than an original cartridge, which may be a serious cons over a X5 (with the non-removable battery).

EZ-Flash2 > Is PSRAM or NOR less power eater than the other one? Maybe you could add an option to disable one of them in an upcoming release? Or maybe you could add an option to reduce performances in Omega menu or when loading roms in PSRAM/NOR memory but keeping it at 100% in games as well.
Don 't know if it's relevant here, but I'm trying to find some ideas to reduce the power consumption as it's an annoying issue for some of us.

 

[steelseth]

Has anyone actually tested how long the battery lasts with the everdrive X5 ?
According to krikzz he measured the everdrive gba at 56.1 ma.

https://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=5139.0

If both krikzz and EZFlash have correct readings then how is everdrive X5 better than EZ Omega at battery management ?

 

[kuwanger]

EZ-Flash2 > Is PSRAM or NOR less power eater than the other one? Maybe you could add an option to disable one of them in an upcoming release?

NOR shouldn't use any power on its own. I'd presume things written to NOR would use less power, but I don't believe PSRAM could be disabled. Overall, I doubt you'd see much power savings there.

Or maybe you could add an option to reduce performances in Omega menu or when loading roms in PSRAM/NOR memory but keeping it at 100% in games as well.

Um, it's not like half the battery is being drained in the Omega menu or when games load. The issue is simply that the EZ Omega needs more power for its PSRAM + FPGA than a ROM. From what KRIKzz said about the Everdrive GBA, I just don't see there being much different in possible power savings*. Although I will admit based on my testing that EZflash2's measurements are optimistic.

* I'd definitely love for someone to actually carry out some tests, though. It's a bit hard for me to believe you'd only see an ~8% drop in battery life.

 

[steelseth]

Ok I did some tests from my own.
This is on a 40 pin AGB 001 unmodified GBA. Which is about twice as power hungry than the 32 pin model. (See https://imgur.com/a/BVQvn#mF29MyX)
It did the test on the original GBA because it was easier to stick the wires to the batteries than a GBA SP. See above link on how it compares to other GBA models and draw your own conclusions.

With no game it draws ~73.9 mA.

With a gbc game it draws ~103.8 mA (Sorry dont have gba game with me)

With the EZ omega while loading the game it goes over ~223 mA.

EZ omega in game ~175.6 mA.

All tests are done with my cheap ass chinese multimeter so take it with a grain of salt.

P.S This is not a knock at the EZ Omega personally I get between 4-5 hours (completely guessing it seems that long anyway) on my 101 sp and Im perfectly happy with it.

 

[Dragon_Types]

The Ez Omega power consumption is still twice more than an original GBA game!