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Keyboard is a writing system intended for handling complex input on a few button device using almost no memory or processing resources (it's just a matter of user interface). Keyboard Advance implements Keyboard system on a Game Boy Advance. The author of Keyboard is Francesco Napolitano (see Contacts).

Screenshots (at the moment visual aspect is not the point! =):









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 Keyboard Advance documentation file:

Licence & Disclaimer
Keyboard Advance is freely redistributable software. The author assumes no responsability on any kind of damage eventually caused by the use of Keyboard Advance.


Intro
So you think I've gone totally mad with this fool idea of writing text on a GBA, and of course you are right, but... no hitch, no fun! And after all this foolishness seems to work pretty well, at least enough to allow me to write this doc on my GBA.


So, What's this?
KA 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).

Beyond mere experimentation, I think you could find this software useful for some particular tasks. KA 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 KA is for use with a real GBA and using it on an emulator makes 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 KA uses GBA SRAM to store its data and this choice has some important implications:

1) Exchanging data beetween KA 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.