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Maybe nobody let you in on the secret, so let me be the first. GBA software 3D looks better than N-Gage 3D despite the lack of hardware support.

Look up blueroses, yeti3d, c2, DRG, et cetera.

There's Yeti 3D, inspired by the well-known (to Linux geeks, anyway) CUBE engine. Around a year and a half ago, BlueRoses was first revealed, too. It's impressive, though I don't know if it was ever used in any commercial GBA games.

Raylight has the big one on their site. It's not an ingame shot unless they used it as a loading screen or something.

The GBA may not have any 3D acceleration hardware, but that doesn't mean it can't do 3D. It's more work, but that didn't seem to stop people from doing it on PCs before 3D acceleration became ubiquitous. Just look at Quake, Descent, etc.

Indeed. And while many attempts have been done on some 3D games, IMHO, none of them succeed really well. Specially Doom for GBA. It's a piece of crap, very slow, looks like they just did a straight port from the SNES version (which also isn't that good). Other 3D games (that I know of) seem to follow the same line.

Maybe the guys doing the Wing Commander game you linked to could make some extra cash by licensing their engine to other GBA developers. Or at least the part of it that rasterizes the polygons; not everyone wants to develop space combat games.

Did a little diggin' to find it out, and while I couldn't find information about that, I found some neat stuff that's comming on the way:

The company that made Wing Commander's Engine
Some demos of that engine
Another 3D Engine from a company on the UK

Even seen comments on some forums about another 3D engine that can run Quake on GBA. But've got no links to that, unfortunately. Looks promising, anyway.

The GBA may not have any 3D acceleration hardware, but that doesn't mean it can't do 3D. It's more work, but that didn't seem to stop people from doing it on PCs before 3D acceleration became ubiquitous. Just look at Quake, Descent, etc.

Indeed. And while many attempts have been done on some 3D games, IMHO, none of them succeed really well. Specially Doom for GBA. It's a piece of crap, very slow, looks like they just did a straight port from the SNES version (which also isn't that good). Other 3D games (that I know of) seem to follow the same line.

Maybe the guys doing the Wing Commander game you linked to could make some extra cash by licensing their engine to other GBA developers. Or at least the part of it that rasterizes the polygons; not everyone wants to develop space combat games.

Did a little diggin' to find it out, and while I couldn't find information about that, I found some neat stuff that's comming on the way:

The company that made Wing Commander's Engine
Some demos of that engine
Another 3D Engine from a company on the UK

Even seen comments on some forums about another 3D engine that can run Quake on GBA. But've got no links to that, unfortunately. Looks promising, anyway.

Actually, there's a true 3D engine for the GBA now. It's called Blue Roses and a port of Wing Commander: Prophecy will be using it.

In other words, the Gameboy Advance doesn't just literally do what Doom did (in 1993), it runs software on a level that wouldn't come to the PC until 1997 (the year Prophecy was released for the PC).

• The hardware supports carts up to 256 megabit (32mb) in size. There are flash carts which have more space, however, through software bank switching. No commercial ROM currently even hits the hardware size limit (manufactureing costs, it is widely believed, are to blame; it may be the case that Big N limits the available size of carts to both themselves and third parties)
  
• Yes, a linux distro would fit. No, it wouldn't be any fun without a keyboard. Yes, TCP/IP has already been done (a working webserver, which IIRC was even on SlashDot already. That's what caused me to try to post the homebrew dev scene the first time.)
  
• Emulators: there are about a dozen good ones around; many stick to VisualBoy Advance and Mappy Virtual Machine for development. VBA is often regarded as the best and fastest emulation, and Mappy is usually seen as having the best debugging tools (source-level breakpoints, register viewing, disassembly, viewers for most of the important chunks of RAM, etc). VBA interfaces with GNU debuggers, but I'm lazy, and haven't tried it.
  
• How good is the processor? Good enough to emulate an NES? Yes. In fact, there's a port of an emulator which runs NES binaries which were stapled onto the end of the emu binary out there already (it uses scaling and rotation to fit the otherwise too-large pictures; some detail is lost, so text often looks funny, etc). I have no linkage; sorry.
  
• To be specific, the processor is an ARM7 TDMI running at approx 16 mhz. Also, the screen does 60hz refreshes, is 240x160, and has a bitmapped 15bpp color mode (among other modes, including z-buffered modes). The programmer is afforded extreme memory mapping flexability by the hardware; it's more fun than a Rubix' Cube.
  
• Sorry - should have clarified - the ones I listed are all emulators for the GBA. Sorry, but not even remotely close. You didn't even get the popular ones. There's a pretty decent list here, at Zophar's Domain (a pretty good dev site)
  
• Descent is probably beyond the GBA's capabilities, since it uses arbitrarily-angled perspective-correct textured polygons, which are a fair bit harder to render on a low-end CPU (the GBA has a 16MHz ARM7 CPU).You should see some of the stuff that's going on. There are a number of fully textured 3D engines out there, one of which actually uses Descent levels as its examples! (I linked to another in my previous post which uses the quake level 1) A good example is the Raylight engine, though there are probably a dozen that I've seen (and a few proprietary, one of which I'm about halfway done writing :) )
  
• Hey, maybe we'll see Tux Racer for the GBA? That'd be tight. Quite possible. A racer wouldn't be difficult - the floor is a mode 7 S/R background, the sprites are prerendered, and there's enough VRAM that they don't need to be DMAed into place or anything (though people do that anyway, often enough [grins])
  
  Actually, how low-level is the API? Any chance someone could get Linux running on one of these babies?"The API" isn't. HAM has an engine, SGADE has an engine, there are others (I don't use them), and there are some commercial ones. But, here's the thing: the hardware does a lot of stuff. Sprites and backgrounds are supported in hardware, and do scaling and blending stuff, etc. It's just register tweakage. You don't really need an API.
  
  Big N does send an API of some sort, but I'm not a licensed developer, so I know dick about it. I'm told it's not that much of a difference - mostly just wrapper functions.
• well if you realyl want to consider assembler an API, that is your answer. ARM flavored assmebler. We're not stuck to Assembly. Though there are about six assemblers in common use (the one that gets most use as not just part of a toolchain seems to be GoldRoad, but because I don't use assembly except in-line, I have a biased perspective), there are also a buttload of C and C++ and so forth compilers. Because Gnu's Compiler Collection (GCC does not mean gnu's c compiler) works and is the common compiler for the homebrew platform, you also have access to *compiled* java, pascal, and I think Objective C and Forth, or Fortran, or something that starts with an F. Too lazy to go check. :)
  
  There are other compilers which can target the platform. Commercial people often use the ARM ADS or SDT. Other tools, like the Metaware toolchain and the Green Hills Optimizing Compiler (it's part of the name, not a parroted description, settle down) are commonly used because of their purported performance. Far from being an expert myself, I'll just point you at the Dhrystone that David Welch graciously presented to the community.
  
• I was planning on trying to develop something on my friends PS2 when he got the Linux kit. But since I actually own a GBA, this is a much more worthy project. More worthy, but more difficult. You'll want a flash cart and linker - the hardware is still the only perfect binary executor, though VBA is pretty impressive. All told, the PS2 Linux kit isn't more expensive, and it's hella more fun in the long run (Tux Racer on a console anyway, doncha know!)
  
• At about $70 (Game Boy Advanced, Amazon price [amazon.com]), you can create custom games, ports of other things, etc. This sounds to me like a much more practical thing to purchase to play around with the the PS2, which is in at least the $500 range to start hacking your own stuff for. You're counting just the hardware in one, but the hardware and the mod stuff in the other. $200 (ps2) + $200 (Linux kit) is $400. There was a recent price drop. $70 (AGB) + $40 (USB Flasher) + $15 (Power cable for flasher) + $10 (Parallel cord) + ~$100 (Average flash cart - price varies by size) = $235. Granted, a $175 price difference, but not what you implied. Also, a lot of us already have both. Then, the price of a homebrew kit actually weighs in the other direction, and the AGB is small and limiting enough that unless you really want to, it's a pain of a challenge.
  
• It would be interesting to know how many people will create practical, non-game applications. I know there are many non-game attachments, like a TV tuner and digital camera available for the unit. There are already music sequencers, methods of connecting it (realtime!) to a PC for chatter, MIDI sequencers, connections to serve as visualizers for various kinds of data collectors (think forest service), and a host of weird homebrew things that aren't exactly games. I expect quite a few more over time; I'm working on one in a half-assed way right now. Moreover, over time I expect level editors for at least homebrew games, and possibly for commercial games; would you call those applications?
  
• This would totally rule.. I'd love to see Nethack for the GB. I'm currently working on a Palm version, and of course, it'll work on Windows CE, but honestly, wouldn't Nethack be an awesome alternative to bejeweled on the bus?Shhh... Shen Mansell already has Moshpit put together, and there are three or four people already rumbling about alternatives on the list. Also, note that I'm on alt.games.roguelike.development making an ass of myself all the time... (For those who may be Ccurious, a BooFly is a creature which looks like Will Riker and which doesn't meet me for coffee at E3. Thpppbbt.)
  
• I think that companies like Nintendo and Sony and such should sell stipped down dev kits for like, say $50... including software you'd need and maybe a transfer cable. This gets kicked around a lot in the chatrooms and on the dev lists. The consensus seems to be that yeah, it'd be nice, but though a lot of people would really use it for what it was for, a whole lot of people would use it to pirate games, and besides, Big N's licensing fees per cart and hegemony on software support their business model, so they'd be hurting themselves anyway. In conclusion: not bloody likely.
  
• No disrespect to the great underground game hackers out there, but I don't think there is much of a risk of an uber fantastic game like Gran Tourismo 3 getting put out. Whereas art and sound resources usually make this true, with time, they actually often do. Take a look into the very mature NES or 2600 development scenes; you'll see things you'd never imagine possible (for instance, someone ported the Z-Machine interpreter Frotz to the GameBoy Advance as GBA Frotz, which seems impressive until you realize that the no$gmb guy, who I think is Martin Korth or something, and who really needs to put his damn name in his bio page, did it for the gameboy(!) in *8* *K* of RAM (far smaller than the real Z-Machine was supposed to be), and it works fine! Linkage
  
  Homebrew developers thrive on being told it can't be done. The more you tell them they can't do commercial stuff, the more you're going to see commercial stuff done. That's what got me started. :)
  
• Yes, Craig Rothwell is reliable (someone else's post). Also, though Lik-Sang is reliable (that's where I got mine), right now cyustoms is banning the import of these, and so you won't get one even if lik-sang mails it to you. Craig Rothwell currently goes under their radar, but don't try him if you're seeing this post a month or so old - things may have changed (they often do, unfortunately). The best thing to do is to go to the Yahoo! Group and ask; you'll get a lot of replies in 48 hours.
  
• I know that the Game Cube can use GBA as controllers. I am not sure what the interface protocol is like, though. Do you think that it might be possible to make custom GBA carts for Cube games, that provide enhancements (cheats, etc) to a game playing on the Cube? No. The GC uses half-size DVD discs which are difficult to burn and which have not yet had their protections cracked or circumvented. Things may change later.
  
• So does this mean that with the ROMS that are for the SNES, we could somehow make our own port of say "Secret of Mana" (or some other SNES title) for the GBA? That would be awesome! Though probably not awesome enough for me to spare time to learn this. If you're dedicated. you need to scale a lot of graphics down; the sound hardware is completely different, so the audio stuff will need to be wholly rewritten. There are odd considerations due to the different CPUs. But, yeah, many people have been porting SNES and Genesis games commercially; I don't see why a team of amateurs with lots of time and skill couldn't do the same. It's not easy, though, mind you.
  
  This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. Pre-chewed pieces of pap! And shouldn't be teaching anyway!!@!3T1!! r00l!
  
  cough Sorry. Old habits die hard.