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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.
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
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.
Check out this for the full specs. Looks like a pretty good machine.
Paul Leader
The specs for the GBA have been known for some time now, and a couple of sites even have some mock-ups of what it might look like. IGN Pocket's FAQ on the GBA should answer most of your questions. Also it's heavily rumored that the Dolphin/Star Cube will intereact heavily with the GBA and there will be built in ports so that you can plug your GBA into your Dolphin.
Full details and a real mock-up will be announced during Space World which is from August 24-26 (I think). It's a Japanese Nintendo trade show when Nintendo will tell all about the Dolphin/Star Cube and the GBA: Including having several GBA playable games. And expect a Slashdot article on the Dolphin specs on August 23rd when Nintendo holds a press conference at 3 PM Japanese time to unveil the Dolphin/Star Cube.
The sound system is dobly surround compliant, and appears to be able to play up to 32 channels simultaneously. Not bad.
The system retains the character mode graphics of the Gameboy, for compatibility as it will still play Gameboy games (is there a Z80 in the machine then, or is it software emulation on the ARM?) but able to show 511 colours at the same time (sounds like 256 colours for the character blocks, and 255 colours for the sprites).
4 controller buttons, A, B, L and R. Horizontal aspect, as opposed to vertical, which is about time! This does limit the system when it comes to Quake style games though, as strafing, looking up and down, crouching, etc would be hard to do quickly as there aren't enough keys. The display is just over 100dpi, which should guarantee crisp high quality graphics.
The system can be connected directly to the Dolphin console when it comes out - this could mean that downloadable games could become popular, or DVDs full of games at least. This would be great for all those older Gameboy games that are only 256k to 1Mbyte in size, as tonnes could be written on a 32Mb flash memory cartridge. Nintendo had better watch out for this.
I can't wait for the machine, although I will probably hold off a while before buying at, so the price will drop from the initial high (probably $200) price it will start at. Those colour screens are expensive. What this machine needs is a GSM mobile phone addon - the high quality screen would be great for WAP, it is bigger than a Palm screen and has colour... If only the screen was touch sensitive, it could make quite a nice PDA :-)
But you forgot Nintendo's killer app: Pokemon. The craze is still going strong and that alone will sell millions of GBA's. Plus the real reason the GB has done so well is because it has some awesome software and longer battery life than it's competitors. Tetris might have sold a couple of million GB's, but it's not the reason it's survived 10+ years.