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Game Boy Advance Screen Shots
Anonymous Coward writes: "IGN Pocket posted the first ever screen shots of Nintendo's Game Boy Advance. The images' quality is quite poor, but you can clearly see that the console is able to push out about twice as much color than a Super NES."
The last three years have seen the Tamagotchi and Pokemon take children in the United States by storm. Please, please, God, do whatever you have to to keep hamster simulators from catching on.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Game Boy Advance
CPU: 32-Bit ARM with embedded memory
Screen: 2.9" TFT reflective screen, 240x160 resolution, 65,535 possible colors, 511 simultaneous colors in character mode; 32,768 simultaneous colors in bitmap mode
Size (mm): 135w x 80h x 25d
Weight: 140g
Power: 2 AA batteries
Battery Life: 20 hours
Software: Cartridge format, GB Color compatible, Game Boy compatible
This post sponsored by Ninja Burger. "
You can clearly see? You can tell the difference between 16k and 32k colours from a 240x160 screenshot? Congratulations. You've obviously got better eyesight than me and the vast majority of the population...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I once had a possibility of having to do some GameBoy Color work. I saw the raw specs and was quite impressed and a little surprised that games for the GBC were not better than what I had seen.
I then saw the constraints on the system and it was so heartbreaking, The real killer was that you can't write to the display while the screen is updating. There were so many things that I'd learnt in my C64 days that I had planned that suddenly I couldn't do.
In many respects I would have prefered a C64 Handheld over a GBC.
So it has a decent CPU and it has pretty Screenshots, but as this link shows, even the GameBoy Color can do pretty pictures. It just can't move them very well. The proof of the GB Advance pudding will be when we see the moving images or the full hardware spec (With the big N the latter is hardly likely).
On second thoughts, What I would really like to see is A C64 handheld. Surely we have the tech to do one well now. Of course there are a few little changes that could be made here and there just to spiff things up a little.
Provide changable rgb defs for each of the colors.
Let the border be turned off without the hacks.
On third thoughts, what I would like to see is the video chipset from my second thoughts filling a frame buffer like a video signal and an Arm for the CPU. Then you'd have the possibility of
1. Run the Fancy Chipset emulate a 6510 on the arm and play old c64 games (cool)
2. Run the Fancy chipset and use the arm natively. (Lots and lots of tricks available then)
3. Just let the Arm write to the framebuffer directly (lets you do things the boring way).
On fourth thoughts, When are we going to get an Amiga Handheld?
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
From the IGN GBA FAQ:
The GBA Specs:
From Compaq and Handhelds.org:
The iPAQ Specs:
Okay... the same processor helps emulation, and the difference in resolution/bitdepth is addressable (unlikely, but possibly even in hardware) by dithering - which can be coded blazingly fast in ASM.
A and B on the right two buttons, shoulder buttons on the left two, remappable for various games and left-handed users. The 5 way pad on the iPaq is (I assume) a "click + 4 directions". I'm just wondering if that's 4 directions true, or if you can combine up and left for "upperleft". Map Start and Select to a key combo - maybe far left + both right for Start and inner left + both right for Select. For fighting games that use combos, you'd need to rework that, but IANAFGP... RPGs and sims are the only things I play.
The really neat thing would be if somebody packaged the emulator with a iPaq accessory sleeve that allowed you to pop in GB carts. Bleem vs. Sony seems to indicate that it could be done legally.
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
one thing that wasn't mentioned in the specs was the screen ratio: 16x9. at least, as close as 16x9 as one can get using multiples of 16.
as any movie enthusiast knows, 16x9 is the dimension of a theater screen. interesting possibilities, no?
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I'll buy it if someone ports MAME and gets most of the pre-85 games to work with it. I'd be in retro heaven.
The others failed because they weren't one or more of the above. When you make a portable console you can't have it weighing the same as a brick and eating batteries like there was no tomorrow.
Ninetendo got it right by making something that was portable and useable. Lets hope their new console takes the same approach.
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Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
First of all, on the GBA you can only display 32k colors in bitmap mode. I don't expect that people are going to use bitmap mode much, especially not at first. To my understanding, the SNES doesn't have such a bitmap mode (and I have a set of documents for programming the SNES in front of me).
So, in character mode we get 512 colors, except color 0 is a transparency bit, so really only 511 colors. By comparison, on the SNES, we have sprites that are made up of tiles. Each tile can display 16 colors. I believe that you can get up to a total of 256 colors between all the different tile palets on screen.
So, the difference between 256 colors and 511 is pretty obvious. Also, the different between 256 colors and 32k colors is even more obvious.
I'm assuming that you are getting you 16k and 32k numbers from the fact that the SNES is a 16bit machine and the 32k colors from the fact that the GBA is a 32bit machine. However, this just isn't the way it works. For starters, if the number of displayable colors and the bit depth of the main processor lined up, then the SNES would display 64k colors (2^16), and the GBA would display over 4 billion colors (2^32). However, processor bit depth and and on screen colors don't always line up. If they did then the N64 would be able to display 2^64 colors, but alas, it is limited to 2^24 (with 8 bit transparency. I'm not sure if the transparency can be used to eek out more colors, but I'm inclined to think not). Actually, pretty much every machine in existance could display more colors than it currently does (with the exception of SGI's Onyx2, which can display 64bit color and it is a 64bit chip).
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
In the age of constant cuthroat competition between video game systems and companies with constantly expanding technology and hardware, the longest lasting console is the minimalist Game Boy. IIRC the Game Boy is over 10 years old, still going strong with only minor updates like the GB Color and now this. Let's see one of those newfangled Next Gen systems try to last half of that time.
:)
I'm not a big fan of games myself, so I won't buy one, but I must admit that the industry and its evolution is very interesting. I just like that a portable mini-system can outlast the heavyweights of the industry. But to be fair, software support always makes or breaks a system too, which is why the handheld brethren of the Game Boy (Lynx, Virtual Boy, GameGear, and TurboExpress) are all in their respective coffins now.
Maybe I'll get one as a gift to my teenage brother so he'll stop wasting his TI-89 with those cruddy little calculator games
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
I'd appreciate to read some specs about that little thing: not a word about them, just two games screenshots.
/.: is it a pocket SNES? Or just some hardware that has about the same abilities than the SNES, but has nothing in common with it?
Perhaps I've missed something, but I can't remember having read something about it on
What about battery life ? Technology used for the screen?
Stephane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
This time round, they will be up against the PsOne (the handheld playstation), and I think they'll lose. Those screenshots look ok, but Nintendo have historically been able to price their handheld games very high, and I've alreadty got a dozen better playstation CDs already in my collection.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I hate to break it to you, but Nintendo is changing; they have to. They lost this generation in part because of the public's perception that they're a "kiddie" company. Hence they're trying to change that image slightly. They're still making regular good family games like Mario and Zelda, but they're also allowing some more "adult-oriented" games too. They recenting announced Sin and Punishment for Japan, and they're allowing several risque games to come out from Rare (second party) like Conkers Bad Fur Day, which might be one the raunchiest videogame ever released, and Perfect Dark. The days when they ban blood in the games for their system are long gone.
here's another new pocket console.
Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich, Malkovich.
There is a Metroid game for Game Boy, Metroid 2. It's 9 years old, but still a good game. While I'd love to see a new Metroid come out, I don't know how likely it is. The Metroid series was never very popular in Japan. If Nintendo doesn't release a game in Japan, they're not going to release it anywhere.
Or, they could do a spin off of Pocket Monsters called Pocket Hookers.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"Clearly there was a huge opportunity to do that and clearly you're going to see an interface between the Game Boy Advance and Dolphin that is more than happenstance and doesn't require a mechanical device, and probably uses the modem and our online capabilities. And having those two pieces of gear grow software -- growing software on one, trading data, raising the level of performance, will make Dolphin a very different kind of dedicated gaming machine."
His entire speech can be found here.
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I was actually quite dissapointed when I read the specs for this. It has an as powerful (or more powerful) a processor than the SNES, better graphics, and certainly there has been an adaptor for SNES systems to play gameboy carts for many years - so why doesn't this thing take SNES cartridges, and come with a SNES > Gameboy colour adaptor?
I would certainly have sprung for the cash to play all my old favourate SNES carts on a handheld; that it could load and play my gameboy carts would have been a bonus, but I *have* a gameboy, and only recently bought a gameboy colour - why should I now buy yet another "improved gameboy" when there will almost certainly be "extended super improved gameboy" or "N64 Gameboy advance adaptor" a year from now which will take my current gameboy cartridges and the new "Game Boy Advance" cartridges (which I *can't* load on anything else at the moment) as well.......
It's an incremental improvement that offers little to tempt me - yes, it's better, but not leading edge, even if it is impressive for a handheld. It *could be* and *should be* better, and I am dissapointed in it.
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-=DaveHowe=-