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consoles haven't been space constrained since 1995

Current Game Paks for the Game Boy Advance handheld game console are only 8 megabytes in size, the same size as the first N64 games.

From the Acorn to the Game Boy Advance, ARM still rules.

"Fenix" is taken, as the publisher of a Win32 to ARM7TDMI cross-compiler distribution used by many GBA software developers.

By amazing, you mean, "worse than Doom?"

You can't expect Doom 3 on a handheld machine. The best you can do on a handheld with a 16.8 MHz ARM7TDMI processor is Doom 1 at 120x120 pixels and 15 to 20 Hz.

The screenshots of the X-Forge demos look vaguely like those of Sega's Virtua games: simple maps, ok character models, few textures. But it looks good for a handheld.

I've got no interest in turning my gamemachine into a typewriter/calculator/browser.

Why would a fellow want to even try to turn a roughly cubic gamemachine into a Web terminal? I can see programming a 32-bit handheld with 10 buttons to act as a simple calculator, but a typewriter?

or are you just talking about Wintendo?

now you can't run illegally copied games, boo hoo.

Would you consider homebrew software to constitute an "illegally copied game"?

The parallel port & USB flash ROM tools also appear to be gone. This has nothing to do with BIOS, by the way. These are tools that allow you to upload binaries (either copied or original code compiled with GCC and other tools) to a flash ROM and run it on any GBA. These products are likely offensive to Nintendo because:
1) consumers could pirate games with them
2) smalltime and wannabe developers could create demos and games with them without forking out big money for the official GBA dev hardware

I'm sure #1 is the main concern for Nintendo. But they've really done a disservice to the GBA demo scene and developers & students that want to get their feet wet with a really great platform.

If you're unfamiliar with #2 (developing your own demos/games/apps for GBA), please take a look at some GBA developer scene links:
GBADEV
GBAEMU
Yahoo GBADEV Group
GBA Dev'rs

I play a lot of strategy games (something you won't find on a console)

Then what are Advance Wars and the forthcoming port of Final Fantasy Tactics to the Game Boy Advance?

Moreover, you don't have to upgrade to play ALL the latest new games, just the memory hogs.

The Game Boy has had only three major versions (1.0: game boy; 1.1: play it loud series; 1.5: gb pocket; 2.0: gb color; 3.0: gba), and all are at least 99.44 percent backward compatible. In addition, the GBA is essentially an open system, and even Nintendo uses GCC to develop for the system.

Even if gross revenues for console games are lower, the higher margins can result in higher profits. I am unfamiliar with licensing costs for PC vs. console.

It costs more than an individual to afford to get official development hardware, and a new publisher already has to have several published video games on the market. (Unofficial development tools for the Game Boy Advance are available here.) It typically costs a publisher $10 a piece to have the console company make a cartridge and stuff it in a box, and that's only if the console company approves the title.

Until you can program for one API and have guaranteed reliabilty that device X supports feature Y then consoles will always rule.

I know that all modern PCs will support the most basic SDL and OpenGL functions. Thus, I can still make simple 2D PC games. However, I can't make games for the DVD consoles because the development licenses are too damn expensive for an individual to afford. (The GBA is wide open.)

If you take that into account, there is no reason not to do a Console game.

Except that you can't find a publisher. This late in the game, if you're developing for a DVD/miniDVD console system, you need to find a publisher to take your title even before you start developing your game, so that you can have access to development hardware.

The GBA, on the other hand, is pretty much wide open by now.

Try looking at the 68K instruction set, or the Z8000 (or Z80000) instruction set. Nice orthogonal instruction sets, no special purpose registers (except for the stack pointer - A7 and R15/RR14 respectively).

Even better, look at the ARM instruction set. Every instruction can be conditionally executed based on the same flags that other archs (6502, 68000, ppc, x86, etc) use for branches. Heck, even the program counter is a general purpose register. If you want to learn on a simple ARM machine, start here.

[With a shell account,] you wouldn't need to [haul big files] very often - you do most of your work in your shell account on the remote box, right?

Much of my current work involves image editing, audio editing, and development of interactive graphical simulations. Do those work well over SSH?

The thought process is that since you have so little bandwidth and probably less power, disk space, memory, etc. at home that there's not much point in using that computer as anything but a glass terminal, and doing interesting things only on the remote system.

I'm still unclear on some of the uses of a shell account. Let's cross-check your thought process against your list of applications:

You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.

Not according to the AUPs of most of the free shell providers I've seen. (Free shell providers are the subject of this Slashdot article.)

You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.

Which is limited by the speed of the eyeballs and fingers. How is reading mail over SSH any better than reading mail over SSL'd IMAP? And unless you run a mailing list, why would sending mail need a lot of server bandwidth?

You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.

To what? To other people's shell accounts? Transferring big .jpg files using a shell account doesn't get them to my screen any faster.

You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.

I assume you're just talking about logging into a remote machine to maintain a CVS repository such as on OSDN's own service. Otherwise, doesn't a fellow who develops software want a fast connection from the box where the application runs to the box where the application's display runs? That's likely to be a lot faster on localhost than on dial-up. In addition, using a programmer's text editor such as GNU Emacs or Vim over a network connection with a 200+ ms ping is a pain in the donkey.

The shell account is the network pc taken one step further, and is effective even with fairly slow networks.

Unless you want to run anything that's image or audio based and interactive. Take too much intelligence off the client, and you run the risk of having the cumulative effects of long-haul latency (speed of light across a big country such as the United States) and last-mile latency (slow dial-up connection) ruin the interactive experience. Has X11 been optimized to run efficiently over 48 kbps down, 24 kbps up?

Still, if you didn't think thin client computing was a good idea, you probably don't find shell accounts useful either.

Makers of modern network computers recognize that thin client does not mean as thin as a teletype machine's paper. They try to achieve a compromise between the shell account setup (all intelligence on the shell server; client is just a terminal or X server) and the PC setup (all intelligence on the client; only data is shared across the network) by using applets compiled to a cross-platform bytecode and run across the network. For more about this approach, look at Java(tm) technology or its competition.

All Nintendo has to do is say that it was intended as such.

The fact that Nintendo made most of the NES cartridge specs PUBLIC in Nintendo Power magazine during the third year of publication kind of blows "anybody who reverse engineers our NES cart edge bus is breaking trade secret law" out of the water.

As an added bonus, the catridge format had the advantage of being a fairly effective form of copy protection, especially in a non-emulated context.

Are you saying emulation is illegal? Try telling that to the developers of Wine and Bochs. If, on the other hand, you merely claim that Game Paks were physically hard to copy, then look at all the pirate multicarts you can pick up in HK.

Sure it was bypassable, but the mechanisms for bypassing cartridge-based protection tended to be fairly elaborate.

I understand that Nintendo 64 Game Paks and later Super NES Game Paks (the one with the SA-1 coprocessor) had a small amount of protection against homebuilt dumping machines, but there is NO protection on Famicom, Game Boy, or Game Boy Advance Game Paks: just write the address, read the data. Write the address, read the data. From there, you can construct a complete backup copy of the binary.

In contrast, the Dreamcast protection was almost non-existent (with an unmodified Dreamcast being able to boot cracked, burned games)

That's about how much protection there is on GB and GBA, and homebrew developers like it.

Is there such a thing [as a respected emulation site]?

Other than this? What about this or this?

Re: Dumping cartridges, you can only do that if the EULA (in the back of game manuals) explicitly allows it.

What do you mean? 17 USC 117 permits a US-resident owner of a program cartridge to dump that cartridge for use on a computer. Because I didn't see any EULA when I handed over my con$ideration, I see no reason why it becomes a binding contract.

(That section doesn't in and of itself permit what these people are doing.)

But I'm still waiting for the iPod for Game Boy Advance hacks!!

Are you talking about a GBA to IEEE 1394 adapter to read games from the iPod's hard drive? That would be possible in theory, but you wouldn't be able to run any of the commercial games because they require a 120 ns access time to ROM, which rotating-media hard drives cannot provide. Without mass production (which would draw nastygrams from NOA), it'd be darn expensive to 1. license the patents on IEEE 1394, and 2. provide 32 MB of RAM to hold the ROM image during play, plus an interface to that RAM. However, it would be easy to make an interface that just supports loading and saving data, for which the community could write special games. The GBA development mailing list had a discussion a few weeks back about the feasibility of a CD-ROM drive for GBA; search archives for "Disc System".

• IRC: #gbadev on EfNet - fairly active channel full of developers, mostly amateur but a few commercial. DO NOT ASK FOR ROMS OR COMPILER DOCS HERE! You would be summarily banned. This is a legit ONLY channel.
  
• Yahoo! Groups "GbaDev". Many of the same crowd as above, but a larger populace, and by email, not realtime chat. Also, there are archives. :) Many of your problems - even surprisingly difficult ones - can be answered just by digging through the archives. Moderated.
  
• There are more tutorials than just The Pern Project, but I can only ever remember that one. :) I got started before that tutorial, so I have no idea of its quality (many people seem to have started with it)
  

• SGADE - The Socrates GameBoy Advance Development Environment - Good, complete, fairly easy to install, completely unrestricted open source. Developer is tireds and overbusy, and wants someone to take over the development. (Yahoo group also available
  
• HAMFree for non-commercial development. Has an installer; fairly painless for Win32 people. There are requirements about using is commercially which I personally do not dig.
  
• DevKitAdvance - The modified distro of GCC that the bulk of us use. You'll see Jason's name on GCC mailing lists from time to time. Thanks, Fenix. (This is the kit I use, though rather heavily modified)
  
• Someone whined and GCCGBA was taken away from us, because it wasn't a whole GCC distro or something (the discussion was never made public, and I'm going by rumor); the remaining packages don't seem to have trouble, but I'm a little will happen to other compilers over time.
  

• Snap together and play GBA Game Creator
  
• Quake Level 1 displayed realtime on gameboy: Article and Video
  

• GbaDev.org - The canonical news source, especially since AGBDEV.NET died. Most things are covered here. Those that aren't can be found at
  
• Jeff Froweihn's Devrs.Com. Jeff Froweihn wrote the lnkscript and various other stuff that you're likely using if use use the homebrew community's stuff. Thank him. Also, he maintains an aswesome, if difficult to take in at once, news site.
  
• GameBoy Land
  

This is nothing really new. I have been doing homebrewed GBA development for a while (bying a flash cart this summer). Here are some links of GCC cross compiled for ARM/THUMB.

Linux and Windows

Also check out gbadev.org for all sorts of demos (source included), emulators and tools.

As a note, I am working on a full API for the GBA called GGAPI. I can do rotation backgrounds, 8-bit bitmaps, hardware sprites and more so far...so again...nothing new...hope you enjoy :)

The link in the article refers to the MacOS X port. Check out this for the "original" Unofficial Gameboy Advance SDK. It has been available for about a year or so. It has always worked on Win32 platforms too, so the submitter did a really bad job. The compiler in the SDK is actually GCC.

Check out www.gbadev.org and www.devrs.com/gba/ for some other GBA development stuff. (And while you're at it, check out my own GBA-page for some of the demos i've written for the GBA :)

If you want build speed, disable optimization etc.

I understand this when developing on a workstation for a workstation target, but if you're developing a graphics engine that must run within 200,000 machine cycles on fixed hardware, and your engine already runs at 84% CPU usage at -O3, you can't afford to turn off the optimizer.

biut it doesn't matter you can STILL buy a n64

You can still buy lots of NES consoles on eBay. Nintendo has long used the existence of eBay against the "preservation" and "but piracy of no-longer-available software is fair use" defences. (I'd give you a link, but it appears to have disappeared in the 2001 redesign.)

emulating the c64 would be a wonderful use of new hardware... emulating the n64 would be piracy

Actually both would be piracy, unless you have specific license contracts that state that you may freely copy and redistribute software for the Commodore 64. Unlike patents, copyrights do not expire.

On the other hand, how did Nintendo 64 software developers develop and test their software? Emulation isn't piracy if you own the copyright on what you're emulating. Even Nintendo has recently realized that that highly substantial non-infringing uses for flash cartridges make the flash cartridges in and of themselves no longer illegal, and has removed the "emulators exist ONLY to play pirated games" language from its IP FAQ.

From the blurb:

RISC OS Select, *the* OS for ARM powered computers

Has RISC OS been ported to the ARM-powered Game Boy Advance?

Or would it take too much memory? GBA has 288 KiB of RAM and up to 32 MiB of ROM (though the biggest current games are 8 MiB).

For the most part, remember, CPU speed isn't the big bottleneck that it used to be

That's true on a big fat GameCube, PortBox, or Athlon PC with 1000 Mflops, but on a 16.78 MHz ARM7TDMI processor, you really need to make every cycle count if you want to keep up with the 59.7 Hz retrace. Most of the tricks that applied on the 486 still apply on the Game Boy Advance.

I don't think there are too many game dev companies still producing software for the SNES... :)

Several game dev companies are producing software for a handheld system that is a Super NES yet isn't a Super NES. The Game Boy Advance is twice as powerful as the Super NES in almost every aspect of 2D graphics, and about as powerful as a Super NES plus Super FX or an Atari Jaguar for 3D. And it doesn't have that annoying SPC700 coprocessor.

Still, isn't decryption/decoding of standards compliance ommitted in the DMCA?

Yes, 17 USC 1201 permits circumvention aimed strictly at interoperability, but many judges have flatly ignored that provision.

I thought the Sony v Colecio settled that (I knew it's sony versus some other vid game company, as the other company won).

The issue in Sega v. Accolade was the Trademark Security System in the Sega Genesis console, which gave the program on the cartridge a short time to call a BIOS routine that displayed "Licensed by Sega", or the BIOS would halt the program. The judge ruled that copying Sega's code to do this was fair use (read the decision to see why). The Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo Game Boy and Game Boy Advance platforms use nearly the same system (except it's a piece of data in the header instead of a piece of code that must be called within time constraints), making it perfectly lawful for homebrew developers to put the logo data in the header as long as they don't cause trademark confusion (which can be avoided with a simple "NOT LICENSED BY $CONSOLE_MAKER" in the initial screen display).

The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA don't replace Sega v. Accolade not only because of the interoperability exemption but also because the systems in the Genesis, DC, Game Boy, and GBA platforms don't control access to a work copyrighted by the console maker, and only (representatives of) the copyright owner can sue under 17 USC 1201.

but what I want is PDA-type apps for my GameBoy Advance.

I once seriously considered developing such an app (using free tools available here), but I ran into two roadblocks:

A PDA needs a real-time clock that can wake the system from deep sleep to remind the user of an event. The GBA lacks both an internal clock and (to my knowledge) a reliable way for the cart to wake the system.

A PDA has a touch screen, useful for inputting text quickly through Graffiti or Fitaly systems. The GBA has an 8-way direction pad, four trigger buttons, and two tiny buttons next to the pad. How do we get text into the thing quickly?

Yes, there have been primitive organizers for Game Boy platforms (Workboy, InfoGenius, and Austin Powers), but I can't see how I would implement anything like the Palm environment. Anybody else have any ideas?

A novel idea (not really), but what I want is PDA-type apps for my GameBoy Advance.

Just write your own. With the space available (max 64 kB) for savegames, and 64 bytes/entry you should be able to store about 1000 names/phonenumbers. :)

BTW, I hadn't ever even heard of a Flash Advance linker, but bought one for my kid the day of the Slashdot story on Zophar's store.

You mean this story

He loves it, and has been copying games like gangbusters--he probably bought his last cartridge.

I have a Flash Advance linker and a 256 megabit flash cartridge. I use them mostly for homebrew development, which is the primary purpose for which the manufacturer markets them. (Here's what I've done so far.) I don't pirate Game Boy games unless there is a clear indication that the publisher has no intention of bringing them to store shelves in the United States. (Yes, I'm referring to the Noddy and Kururin games.)

Yet I don't see an SDK for it. I don't see links to how to develop games on it.

The manufacturer's site links to a site about homebrew GBA development.

Just a link to a bunch of emulators, one of them called 'BoyCott'.

VisualBoy is better.

If the site had been "Here's the product you need to run your GBA apps on your GBA, and here's documentation on how to program for it, and here's some samples of code", then I'd accept that it is a developer's tool. But there's no evidence of any of that.

Then what are those links to gbadev.org and devrs.com doing on the left side of visoly.com?

Yet I don't see an SDK for it. I don't see links to how to develop games on it.

The manufacturer's site links to a site about homebrew GBA development.

Just a link to a bunch of emulators, one of them called 'BoyCott'.

VisualBoy is better.

If the site had been "Here's the product you need to run your GBA apps on your GBA, and here's documentation on how to program for it, and here's some samples of code", then I'd accept that it is a developer's tool. But there's no evidence of any of that.

Then what are those links to gbadev.org and devrs.com doing on the left side of visoly.com?

I'm in Australia so Lik-Sang can still get stuff through to here

I ordered a GBA flash memory card and linker (for legit home development if you're curious; my GBA page is here) from Lik Sang and had it shipped EMS Speedpost (as opposed to UPS), and it arrived just fine. The problem is with UPS's over-restrictive customs policy.

GBA flash cards are considered illegal

How are GBA flash cards any more illegal than SmartMedia or CompactFlash cards?. If I load only free software onto a Visoly flash card for Game Boy Advance, whose copyright am I infringing? Yes, free software for GBA does exist, and copying the Nintendo boot logo is legal under Sega v. Accolade. (Read More...)

rule #1 NEVER buy ANYTHING valued over $20 at best buy. best buy comes from bizzaro world

NEVER may be too strong of a word. My friend bought a Game Boy Advance system at Best Buy (was $90, now $80), and it works fine, even with third-party development add-ons from Visoly. It should be safe to buy factory-sealed Nintendo products anywhere.

they have gay pr0n for the GBA now?

The GBA has a JPEG viewer library. You're free to construct your own slide-show program and either burn it to a flash cartridge or send it over the link cable. See gbadev for more details.

What's going to happen when he's played enough games and he decides he wants to make his own? He's sure as hell not gonna make it on a GBA

Bull dung. This site has tons of information on how to program a GBA and where to find flash cartridges.

The net yaroze was in fact a VERY scaled down development system, if you can even call it that. It would use a serial cable to connect to the pc and had a special program to run. The most you could do was upload small programs the size of the playstations memory (2MB IIRC).

So in effect, what you got with the Yaroze was the same thing that you get now with the stock Game Boy Advance plus a PC to GBA link cable. The GBA uses a serial cable (attached to the PC's parallel port) to connect to the pc and has a special program to run (mb.exe). The most you can do is upload small programs the size of the GBA's memory (256 KB). It's designed for netbooting off cartridges, but it makes a nice devkit for those starting out in GBA development.

It did not allow access to the cd drive at all either.

Unlike Yaroze, the netboot method lets you access the cartridge, the serial port, everything. To keep the system from booting off the cart, hold Select+Start while booting and then send your boot image.

Look at the 3 consoles. PS2 wins if you want a quantity of games, period.

Four.

Nintendo currently sells two consoles: the GameCube, and the 32-bit Game Boy Advance. (Yes, the GBA is a console. It has twice the power of Super NES, and a third party makes a TV adapter.) The GBA can play over a thousand official games, including games designed for Game Boy and Game Boy Color. (Are there more Game Boy games or more PS1 games?) That doesn't even count the demos and mini-games that any C programmer can develop and run on the system with a flash card or $50 link cable.

Gamecube has an amazing controller

I agree, but a fellow has to admit that it's a copy of PlayStation's with the L1 button removed, the L2 and R2 buttons made analog (like Dreamcast), and the left pad and stick interchanged.

Intel only looks good in integer math... games don't do integer math

Yes, 3D games are mostly floating-point, but 2D games (such as ports of some arcade fighting games) use integer math, and game AI uses heavy integer math.

Microsoft needs to bundle: a mediocre DVD player, a mediocre video game player

Microsoft currently sells this for $330 (XBox + DVD dongle).

a mediocre MP3 jukebox

Well within the XBox's capability, but Microsoft would rather use the WMA format than what some journalists have termed "Music Piracy 3".

a mediocre PVR (VCR Replacement)

So you're proposing an XBox + Ultimate TV combo deck. It'll be a while before Microsoft can get costs down to put the price below $300.

My prediction is that, unless antitrust legislation in the U.S. gets some teeth between now and then, the PC will become a Gameboy within fifteen years. Enjoy computers while they last.

Game Boy is a bad example. The Game Boy Advance is an open system, fully documented to the point that anybody with GCC can write software and run it on the GBA without taking a vow of silence or paying the big N. The only things the GBA checks before running your code are 1. the very simple checksum on the header and 2. a bit pattern that produces the Nintendo logo but is legal to copy under the Sega v. Accolade precedent. So go get GCC for ARM and an MBV2 cable from lik-sang.com and get hacking.

$article =~ s/become a Gameboy/become an XBox/; and it becomes more accurate.

While Nintendo currently have the hand-held crown it stopped accepting developers for the GBA a long time ago claiming that 400 was enough. From the handful of decent titles I'd guess it isn't.

Just because you can't sign up for Wario World (Nintendo's official developer support program) doesn't mean you can't develop GBA games and get published with one of the Tier-B publishers. If you want to get into GBA development, get yourself VisualBoyAdvance and GCC targeted for ARM7TDMI and start hacking. Then you can try your games on hardware with an MBV2 cable or Flash Advance Linker from Lik-Sang

Like the GBA it would almost certainly use an ARM chip as that's the only supported processor for Windows 'CE' 2002.

ARM or MIPS or PowerPC or x86 makes little difference compared to the graphics chip. Nintendo's GBA supports up to 128 sprites on top of four layers of scrolling, two layers of scrolling and one layer of rotation, two layers of rotation, or a bitmap. IIRC, Windows CE devices have only a bitmap and no hardware sprites, not even one for a mouse pointer because most of them are pen-based.

Intel got exclusive rights to StrongARM

Nintendo got exclusive rights to Atlantis

since GBA is just a ARM7 + custom sound off the APB

Wrong. The GBA programming model includes a 16.78 MHz ARM7TDMI, plus custom chips that do DMA (that is, hardware-accelerated memcpy()), legacy tone generation, sound FIFOing, pulse-width modulation, and background and sprite scrolling, scaling, and rotation. (Read More...)

different enough that nitendo cant sue and developers have to recompile but easy enought that you could have a compiler switch do all the work

Sorry, it's not as easy as a recompile of a program that uses the Allegro library. The graphics subsystems may be too different. AFAIK, Windows CE devices use only a dumb frame buffer; GBA has six modes, three character graphics modes (some include affine mapping) with up to 128 sprites on top, and three framebuffer modes with up to 128 sprites on top.

(except the sound and that could be redone easy enough)

Heck, Nintendo even calls the GBA's FIFO-based sound system "Direct Sound," no relation to Microsoft's DirectSound.

The PS2 plays PS1 games.

The Game Boy Advance is about as powerful as Atari Jaguar (i.e. twice as powerful as Super NES) and also plays Game Boy Color games. It also connects to a TV with the third-party TV de Advance.

Nintendo seems to have really raunchy business policies. Suing people, compromising design decisions to protect license fees, etc.

I guess Nintendo messed up when it designed GBA. GBA has absolutely NO independent software creation prevention measures other than checksumming the header and looking for the Nintendo logo (which is legal to reproduce under Sega v. Accolade). Learn how to develop your own software at gbadev.org.

What about all of us who decided not to purchase the Gameboy Advance, and merely play it with our emulator and roms?

I have VisualBoyAdvance for one reason: homebrew. It's a heck of a lot faster to test software that I just wrote and compiled on an emulator than to wait for a transfer over the MBV2 netboot cable.

I just got my GBA for Christmas (yes, I'm 30 years old... what's your point?) and the first thing I started thinking about was how to start programming for it. Here's some of the stuff I found:

• Dev'rs GBA Dev FAQs
• GBXemu Gameboy Emulator site Coolness. Emulators for GBA and GBC and ROMS. Try before you buy...
• Lik Sang Game Boy products Check out the blank 256Mg cartridges for the GBA and GBC with optional adapter. Very, very cool.
• Gameboy Advance Developer's site

And of course a Google search will bring up a bunch more, but these are the nicest I've found so far. The last link is great because it has "demo" programs that include the code - which is key for learning how the insides of this thing work. There's an asteroids example that's really nice.

One thing that I just realized is that the GBA is based on a ARM/Thumb processor and includes a "Z80 like" processor also for when you insert GBC games. This is pretty wild. I think I'll submit an article to /. on how many companies are using ARM-based processors now. I just read that Simbian has just been ported to the ARM, PocketPCs use them exclusively, etc.

-Russ

VisualBoy Advance or Boycott Advance

I recommend VisualBoy Advance, as it focuses on compatibility über alles.

a PSX to USB controller adapter (or any USB gamepad)

The official GBA development system uses a Super NES controller. Play the exact game the developers made with an easily-soldered parallel port adapter. Read More in this journal entry.

Morpheus to download ROMS

Why? With Morpheus or WinMX, 1. it's illegal, and 2. you can never be sure you have a good dump. Better to buy the cartridge and use a Flash Advance linker to dump it. Follow the links at gbadev.org (I don't work for gbadev.org) to see where to buy a linker. Plus, with a linker and a flash cartridge, you too can make GBA games.

How many people did you see pirating N64 games? Hardly anyone has the ability to write to a cartridge, so if these papers took their input from a cartridge piracy would not be easy.

Nintendo 64 piracy was hard because every official cartridge in a territory had an identical "key" chip. The mechanism by which the Nintendo cartridge lock/key system (used on NES, Super NES, and N64) works is patented (until about 2005), and it relies on a program that's copyrighted (effectively forever), letting Nintendo go after backup devices.

Game Boy Advance, on the other hand, has no encryption and no lockout. The only checks its BIOS does are checks for the Nintendo logo (legal to reproduce under Sega v. Accolade) and a simple checksum on the ROM header. Its cartridge interface (multiplexed address bus and data bus) has the Intellivision's system as prior art. And you can get a development kit with a cartridge writer and a flash cartridge that holds 256 megabits (enough for four to eight official ROMs or even more independently produced ROMs) for under $200. Go to gbadev.org for details.

Don't steal games. Just because piracy is easy doesn't mean you should do it. Instead, download games released under a free software (or even just free-beer) license. In the future, I will be releasing some free GBA games here.

Actually, it's also used (in GBA mode) as the "sound cpu".

You're confusing the GBA with the Sega Nomad. I have written some software for the Game Boy Advance. The technique of letting a second cheap CPU handle some sound chores is common on Sega Genesis and necessary on Super NES (which has very little bandwidth between the sound side and the CPU side of the system), but in Advance mode, the GBA completely cuts power to its GBZ80 processor.

Read more about the GBA hardware here.

http://mc.pp.se/dc/
http://dcdev.allusion.net/
http://www.boob.co.uk

The GameBoy Advance is also rather lovely to code for, although it does require special hardware to get started..

Of the upcoming machines left in the console wars (Playstation 2, XBox, and GameCube), GameCube appears to be the "least hackable",

The Game Boy Advance, on the other hand, is the most hackable. All you need is GCC and a $50 cable, and you can connect your PC (running Linux or Windows) to a GBA through the parallel port and send short programs to the GBA's 256 KB of RAM. You can even program flash cartridges through the cable if you develop a larger program that you have tested on an emulator such as VisualBoy Advance.

Preorder your item today:

Shinco DVD 030 DVD/SVCD/VCD/CD/MP3/MegaDrive Player

$649.00 US Dollars

Don't see this as an advert - it really sounds like a pretty cool gadget

Before you buy, why don't support some free game development for the GBA by clicking your way to lik-sang from GBADEV

Gameboy Advance?

Dreamcast?

CJE Micros used to sell really cheap (as in $120) RISC PCs to programmers in an attempt to broaden the support for the platform.

Twinkle