Friday News

While you're reading the manual for the setup instructions you come upon a rather astonishing page. Modding instructions! Not only do they allow you to tweak your X-Arcade they positively encourage it! It has detailed instructions for tweaking the responsiveness of the controls by adjusting the microswitches. Great stuff for people who have to tune everything to their liking. The adjustments are simple to do once you take the back off the controller. Simply bend the microswitch actuators a little so that less or more stick deflection is needed to close the contacts. Out of the box I'd say the adjustment is about 'medium' if that means anything. The sticks might not have the close tolerance you need to pull off the dazzling combos in fighting games or the more relaxed tolerance you might want for games which feature 4 way control like Pacman. That isn't to say it doesn't work out of the box but you might just want to tweak it to perfection for your favorite game type.

The hard disk technology, parallel ATA (PATA), was the best if it’s time, back to 15 years ago. The transfer rate of the time was just merely 3.3MB/sec only. That was like the speed of 22X CD-ROM. As hard disk developers continue to strive much faster and reliable design, it has finally reached its maximum potential speed, which was 133MB/sec currently. Besides, other factor also contributes to the limitation of the parallel ATA design..

The first surprise is the size of the box. I have to admit our first thought was: 'Damn supplier, they delivered the power supply for GBA SP instead of the console itself!'. When you open the box you realize the compact design of the new GBA is not just press talk, it's really much smaller and comfortable than the first Gameboy Advance. And it looks stylish.

The CAK4-88T package should be attractive to many kinds of people. Because of the LEDs and copper heatsink it's clear that case-modders and overclockers were the target audience GlobalWin had in mind when they made it. If you do want even better cooling then you should consider replacing the fan with one that pushes more air, but I can say for sure that this HSF will please most customers.