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DanTE Advance is, as far as I know, the only GBA text editor around. The reason for this resides of course in the hardware constraints of the GBA input capabilities: 10 buttons (including control pad directions) for 26 higher and lower-case letters, 10 cyphers, punctuation and other symbols. In addition the software has to deal with conventional user-interface inputs (moving cursor, skipping pages, popping menus etc.). DA is my personal attempt to face this apparently unsolvable problem through the use of an intelligent key mapping I named K+. Dante Advance and K+ are ideas and hard work by Francesco Napolitano. The usage of DA or K+ is free for any non commercial-related purpose.
Screenshots (not from the last version):
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Here is the time LittleWriter takes
to put 15 documents on my GBA through an
old parallel port linker. Not much, eh?
Below is an excerpt from the DanTE Advance documentation file:
Licence & Disclaimer
DanTE Advance is freely redistributable software. The author assumes no responsability on any kind of damage eventually caused by the use of
DanTE Advance.
So, What's this?
DanTE Advance is a text editor designed in such a way to speed up the typing as much as it is possible on an input device which is no more than a joypad (like the one of the GBA).
This is accomplished through an intelligent mapping beetween the keys of a
standard keyboard and the few buttons of the GBA. No additional hardware,
no memory stress, no big process power needed.
Beyond mere experimentation, I think you could find this software useful for some particular tasks.
DA is in fact capable of exchanging data with your favourite PC text editor in a very fast and straight way, so you could use it for editing your document drafts in bus or bringing all the
work made at home with you in digital form.
Of course DA is intended for use with a real GBA while using it on an emulator
would make no sense at all. It also requires good lighting for your eyes to keep safe. A GBA SP is the best choice.
Importing and exporting data
Actually DA uses GBA SRAM to store its data and this choice has some important implications:
1) Exchanging data beetween DA and a PC is as easy and fast as loading an SRAM bank on your cart. This operation is supported by most GBA cart flash software and takes just a few seconds to be accomplished. You can handle this SRAM banks as text files and edit them with any PC text editor.
2) Save and load operations are fast, since writing to and reading from SRAM is fast.
3) Let's come to the only drawback: SRAM is 32KB and actually this is the maximum number of characters available for your documents alltogether. This limit could easily be overtaken implementing a compression method or using other GBA memory resources in conjunction with the SRAM, but at the moment such a project is not in my sweetest dreams. Still I think that 32KB is enough for your bus-writing sessions, assuming you don't live in a bus! Keep in mind, however, that I`m referring to 32KB as a lower bound on your cart capacity. Probably it can handle much more than that.