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Game Boy Advance Arrives
Gary writes: "Nintendo begins shipping its next-generation handheld game in Japan this week. Nintendo estimates that it holds a 90 percent share of the portable game market, though some analysts believe that percentage to be even higher. It is the first to have a horizontal alignment, and it is 17 times faster than the Game Boy Color, which was released in 1998." This is the first portable gaming system I'm really tempted by -- horizontal alignment is The Way Things Should Be on such things;) Update: 03/21 03:53 AM by T : And Prabhjeet "The One" Singh writes: "According to Gamespot, Activision will be releasing a version of DOOM for Nintendos upcoming Game Boy Advance. No game has given me more sleepless nights. Now its time for sleepless plane rides, mall trips, etc. I can't wait."
Nintendo's been milking the Game Boy for about what, 10 years now? They were all the rage when I was in first grade, and now they're all the rage now in tenth grade.
Really, though, does this new GB have a backlit display finally? Does it slurp up batteries like the Game Gear did?
First Game Boy to have a horizontal alignment, yes.
First handheld period, hell no. Sega Game Gear had both horizontal alignment and a color screen years ago.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
anyone know how long one can play on these things before a recharge?
"It is the first to have a horizontal alignment"
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the Atari Lynx, Sega GameGear, Sega Nomad, and Neo-Geo Pocket Color all "horizontally aligned"?
In fact, about the only vertically aligned handheld game system I can think of is the original Gameboy!
I'm assuming horizontal alignment means the controls are horizontal from the screen? has everyone forgotten about the ill fated Sega Game Gear??? 3.58 mhz of pure gaming speed, who could ask for more!
How long before someone puts Linux on one of these.... That's all we need.. A gameboy pda. ;)
This thing is laid out almost exactly the same as the ill fated sega game gear..
Looks killer though
Neu
So this is the one where they are reselling all their SNES games, instead of the one where they are working on reselling all their NES games? I looked at Shadowgate for Game Boy for about 10 whole seconds before I realized it was an identical port of the NES version.
The emulator/abandonware folks aren't going to like this that much.
I hate the name. It's like they're asking us to adopt pronunciation mistakes made by non-fluent English speakers.
Come on, "advance" isn't an adjective, it's a verb. It should be "Game Boy Advanced" if anything.
And if they wanted to be funny while misusing the language, it should be "All your game boy are belong to us." :-)
There goes my chance to release my own hand-held system and thwomp Nintendo. ;)
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
There's already a form of PDA for the Gameboy. It's a freeware ROM made by TeamKNOX. You can download it from here. If you need an emulator for it you can download one (Windows) here. It's actually pretty fun to play with. There is also a retail GB PDA, made by Datel, but I believe it is only available in Europe.
I do not understand the big fuss about horizontal alignment. It would just seem to be more of a hassle to play. With the vertical configuration your arms are in tighter, allowing you to play in more confined spaces. I used to play tetris lying on my side in bed, but with the new gameboy one arm would uncomfortably be up in the air. It just seems easier to keep your arms rested and play for long hours with the old config. Aside from the ability to have LR buttons on the top, what's the advantage?
Did anyone hear about the handheld microsoft is supposed to release after the Xbox? I just read about it somewhere but it didn't go into any detail.
What really needs to happen is for Sony and Handspring and Palm to dump their proprietary module formats and get Palm OS to support Game Boy cartridges. Oh, yeah.
Am I the only person who didn't realize that the GB still used a Z80 processor still? Too bad, they finally went to something good, but MAN! The Z80 has driven everything from the Osbornes of old to TI claculators to the Game Boy!?!?!?! That rules!!!
Now instead of "Pokemon Gold" and "Pokemon Silver" we can have "Pokemon Midnight Blue" and "Pokemon Burnt Sienna" and "Pokemon Baby Poo Green."
I can't wait! Pikachu! Bizatchu!
Execute? [Y/N] _
I saw Silent Hill run on that thing. That thing is like a minnie handheld playstation. I thought it was just a handheld snes, but after seeing SH, it's more.
-Arkeon- Broadband Bastard
There is no prior reference to the words 'Game Boy' in the body. Though you may know what it means, the statement is incorrect as it stands.
Doesn't this machine seem a bit too small, even for a handheld? I don't care how many thousands of colors it can show, if the screen's 41mm x 61mm, does it really matter that much? This is not a flame.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Anyway, last I heard the GBA includes the GBC chip with it so it's 100% backwards compatible with all the old games (unlike Sony's poor effort with the PS2 playing PS1 games). But then, I might be wrong, I haven't read up on the GBA much since it was shown off last year with the GameCube...
Alright, I really hate to get off-topic like this, but since when did www.howstuffworks.com turn into a media front for Nintendo? I mean, I've used the website several times to show stuff to people that I couldn't explain well, and I've always thought that they did an excellent job, but that articale wasn't blatently spouting off Nintendo's message. There was barely any review of what the actually hardware was (although I do like the fact that its using an ARM processor (who wants to hack it for Linux??))... Sorry to go off-topic, but I just had to say something. Oh yeah, what's the deal with the colors on the GBA???
/* Of course I'm real, but can you prove it? */
No consumer electronic equipment is worth a hoot until *nix runs on it!
-Spack
I love how I submitted this information about the GameBoy Advance on
2001-02-02 16:23:38 Game Boy Gets Advance (articles,games) (rejected)
which was totally rejected, nice scoup guys, you just a tad behind tho, been there done that...
I think though as I said before its a smart marketing and production act to rerelease old games, not only for us who remember the titles, but those like my sister who may never have experienced great games like "Pilot Wings", "Super Mario Bros. 2", and "F-Zero" etc etc. In order to truely apreciate games you must play the past realize it takes much more than graphics it takes STORY and these old games really had that going on, so cudos to Nintendo for bringing back great memories.
"Why do I need a girlfriend when I got women I don't even know yelling at me!?" -- roomate
this is a quote from the site
The Game Boy Advance is Nintendo's first horizontally aligned handheld game.
Ill-fated Game Gear? How about the ill-fated Sega Nomad? And the Virtual Boy might count as horizontal...how many people bought those pieces of monkey dung? I say Nintendo has an uphill PR battle to overcome the Horizontal Curse.
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Co-founder of GerbilMechs
Think of it as a the GameBoy Advance, kinda like the Prussian Advance. That's like what...a gerundive?
...to make a Lynx II!
if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans
Um, if you're talking about the orientation of the actual Gameboy, it's the same configuration used by the Atari Lynx, Sega Game Gear, Sega Nomad, etc, etc. In fact, the Gameboy has been the only system traditionally *not* oriented horizontally. All of them were done years ago.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
"unlike Sony's poor effort with the PS2 playing PS1 games"
Do you care to back that statement up? The PS2 works perfectly with all but about 25-50 PS1 games, most of which are purely japanese.
And no 25-50 is not that much compared to the thousands of games in the PS1's library.
The machine uses the same LCD idea as the Gameboy Color (no backlight to save battery life), but with a larger resolution vs. a paltry 160x120 with 64 colors on screen at one time (Gameboy Color), it's hard to see. You can only go so far with upending resolutions on a not-backlit screen before people start to notice.
There are a couple of obvious design flaws. The cartridge stickers actually face *in*, so you can't see what game you're playing from the back when you turn the until off. The L and R buttons are a bit of an odd touch (traditionally, to use L and R you have to take your hands off the back of the device -- which in this case, would cause you to drop it). When you plug a normal Gameboy or Gameboy Color game in it sticks out the top of the unit.
Couple that with the Hello Kitty colors and the small-buttons, and you don't exactly have a game machine that's going to tie over the Playstation masses. If Sony ever decided to make a handheld device that could play PS One games (which has been rumored for years now), they would win over a lot of adult gamers. All they would need is a battery to recharge a small CD player, and a cost-effective screen like the Gameboy Advance.
P.S. Doom on Gameboy Advance is going to be like Doom for Super Nintendo. That is, slow frame rates, using Mode 7 to generate pixelated graphics. No texture smoothing. Just blocky goodness (and a tinny sounding speaker to hear the grunts).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I'll vouch for that. Final Fantasy IX runs like a dream on my PS2 (and with texture smoothing on it's absolutely delicious).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Not working with 25-50 games is not 100% backwards compatibility, is it?
I believe what I'm thinking about was the Sega Genesis. I might be wrong on the name. It was portable, horizontally aligned and in color, and that was nearly a decade ago. I remeber playing Sonic on it. I can't image Game boys new version to be any more popular than Sega's was. The part that gets me is why Nintendo is calling it 'Advanced' when it is anything but that. Goofy marketing people.
The previous comment was specifically referencing the handheld market, for one thing. For another, I feel fully justified in getting a little bit annoyed from all these people who have no concept of gaming history, and yet pretend to be experts.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
but at the moment this sums up my feeling on the matter... two rpgs for launch in japan and we aren't getting either of them? for shame! no mention of tactics ogre gaiden or fire emblem - maiden of the dark coming to america... historical war gamers would love napolean from what i've heard. and is nintendo bringing any of that here? well we'll get pokémon for sure...
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
A relife for the 16 bit era? could the SNES 'time of light' be once again upon us? It looks that way- from the game lists anyway. But it makes me wonder-- very few things nowadays are done for the 'fans'- they're done for the $'s and the Advance seems too good to be true.
Does anyone know if tey confirmed the FF4-6 remakes yet?
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
"The Game Boy Advance is turning the handheld unit on its side -- for the first time, Nintendo is using a horizontal alignment for its handheld game. The screen is in the middle of the device, with the A and B buttons on the right side of its face and the start and select buttons on the left side. This design is similar to Nintendo's competitors and was first used on the now-obsolete Atari Lynx in 1989."
Everything in this post is false.
all the blit funtions are written in software right ?
so the differance is
ARM7 core
or z80 core
I belive that the GBA dev env is GCC !
rock on how about a emulator or any resources ?
any software example ?
regards
john jones
The USA is just as adept at murdering English...
Who cares when it hits the self... when can it run BSD... And can you imagine a beowoulf cluster of these....
Jon Bardin
It seems to me that a lot of you don't really understand what's oging on with the game boy advance. It has the same LCD technology as the Game Boy color only it has back lighting and more color. It can play games that are just about as high quality graphics wise as star fox. I also heard it has an internet connection possibly. And when connected to the gamecube as a controller you can do cool stuff with it like choose plays in a football game. The technology for making something like this has been around for a long time, but it has recently improved a lot. It doesn't drain tons of batteries. I think it takes a few AA's and runs for hours. It also has a lot of games like Mario Kart that I really want. Some people say they are just re-releasing NES and SNES games, which is a GOOD thing. This gives Nintendo an excuse to bash emulation. They are showing that they can still profit off of old software and because the software is still commercially available they have a real strong case when busting ROM sites and such. Besides I just want the 4 player games going on during the extra long road trip.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Elron Hubbard, noted cult founder at Rivendell? ;)
Batteries in the GBA are said to last for twelve hours.
Do you like German cars?
yeah I cant use a spell checker because they dont have one for WAP
now stop messing around rob and post an answer
(-;
john
...The greatest and the worst moment in gaming history...
Finally a (slightly) new doom, that I can carry around and play for 10 hours at a time....
.... THAT YOU CANNOT PLAY IN THE DARK!!!
Oh cruel fate, why do you mock me so?
without the eerie glow coming from your little screen that we got in the 486' heyday, it just won't be the same....
But of course it will be better than zelda for bus-journey replay.
--Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
How, in a world such as ours, could wanting to play games involving pink and blue animals and caricatures of hopping Italian-Americans on a dinky little screen ever qualify as "socially depraved"?
:)
Moronic, maybe, but depraved? Please; it is society with its violence and dehumanization that is depraved, not the proto-nerd with his GBA.
Alot of people have said how great Game Gear and Genesis was, But now that Sega's making software, isnt it entirely possible for them to bring back classic game gear or Genesis games for advance, like Nintendos doing with snes? Sega already is working on Chuchu Rocket for GBC and GBA, and theres nothing stopping them from porting the Phantasy Star series or a few new Sonic games for GBA.. I think that would be awesome. Whoa. Nostalgia trip. cool.
--Craz
You know, at some point I quit being a snob and bitching the 10 year olds for playing pokemon and I tried the goddamn game. I actually found it pretty entertaining, moreso than most of the vertex pumping games that I tried in the last years. Of course I stopped playing when I realized that my compulsive personnality was kicking in and I was planning which monster was on my team by calcuting the damage done to specific types of monsters. I definately can see why they were successes, and people making fun of Nintendo because of this franchises are way off IMHO.
Oh, and here's one thing I like about the game boy : the success of the system and the games are purely based on fun factor, unlike most technology displays that get packaged into a box with a game concept put in like it was an afterthought.
The new Gameboy will plug into the upcoming Cube to act as a controller... a controller with a seperate screen. Wonder if you could use this to set up a second view?
Selecting plays for american football is a different matter entirely. But the Dreamcast did this how long ago? *cough*VMU*/cough*
Will I retire or break 10K?
I suppose that it is once the terms of the original copyright run out, don't you?
Copyrights expire? Where'd you get that idea? Anything copyrightable first published on or after January 1, 1923, is under perpetual copyright in the United States.
Will I retire or break 10K?
has everyone forgotten about the ill fated Sega Game Gear??? 3.58 mhz of pure gaming speed, who could ask for more!
Sega Game Gear has a 3.58 MHz Zilog Z80 microprocessor (and a reduced Sega Master System chipset). Zilog Z80 has several "advanced" instructions that are on the die but were not fully tested (or documented) in the first run of chips. Nintendo Game Boy has a 4.0 MHz Sharp Z80-clone processor with a different set of "advanced" instructions. Game Boy Color can overclock the gb-z80 (as emulator developers call it) to 8.0 MHz on newer games for more performance.
Taking a cue from Sega Genesis and Sony PlayStation 2 (the latter just recently came out where I live), Game Boy Advance contains a 4/8 MHz gb-z80 processor (and the rest of the original GB hardware) as an I/O controller. There's also a 17 MHz (?) ARM processor, sprite-scaling hardware (think Super NES with Super FX acceleration) with 511 simultaneous colors, and two digital PCM channels (left and right); software expands this to 16 or so voices (think .mod players for SB).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Anyway, last I heard the GBA includes the GBC chip with it so it's 100% backwards compatible with all the old games
(Sega did the same thing with the Genesis, to play Master System games.) There was actually one title that required the original (green screen) Game Boy because it included a keyboard that plugged into the serial port on the side and didn't fit into the smaller connectors on GB Pocket and GB Color. This title was Workboy; it foreshadowed the modern PDA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The official word from Nintendo is that Game Boy Advance is comparable to a Super NES console with the Super FX accelerator (for sprite scaling and rotation).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Game Boy was successful because of its games and its steadily dropping price. It may have also had something to do with the fact that the Game Boy never tried to do too much. Each new version has built slowly and steadily upon its predecessor, while maintaining backwards compatability. The Game Boy Pocket had a smaller chassis and a much sharper/clearer screen. The Game Boy Color added a faster processor and basic color support. The GBA is their biggest leap forward yet, but unless it completely sucks, I think Nintendo has the name recognition to pull it off. (And hell, it's about the only name recognition Nintendo has left.)
Anyway, I think that 90% is actually a bit low. Six or seven years ago, they probably had 60-70% of the market. Today, I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo has 99% of the handheld market. Their few competitors have dropped off the face of the earth, and they keep on releasing more popular games. (Donkey Kong, Pokemon series, et cetera. I don't play GB anymore but my 12-year-old brother is a GB nut and I can tell what's popular from what he and his friends play.)
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I like to watch.
Question - Given that this is for a Nintendo platform, will this be butchered as badly as I'm told Castle Wolfenstein was?
Only four things were changed in Wolfenstein 3d: Germany ==> Master State; Hitler ==> Staatmeister; Hitler photo ==> developer's mug; Swastika ==> Eagle. (Note: butcher is also the last name of the guy who claims to have created Precious Moments.)
I'm told that Nintendo has some pretty draconian content restrictions.
SNES Mortal Kombat's blood was always light gray. When Nintendo realized that the red blood code (a b a c a b b) on Sega Mortal Kombat was selling Genesis consoles the way pixel-perfect Street Fighter II had sold SNES consoles, it wisely allowed configurable red/green/no blood in Mortal Kombat II and subsequent games. There was a relatively unaltered Doom port (a few levels and a lot of framerate were lost in the 2 megabyte cartridge) to SNES+SuperFX, which is incidentally the model Nintendo uses to explain the graphics power of GBA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
but lets set the minimum requirement as needing a 500MHz PIII or better and at least a Geforce2 or Radeon. Anything cannot be considered an innovation
All those first-person shooters seem to be innovating off each other ;-)
or cutting-edge in any way...Unless it meets those requirements, it's not breaking new ground.
Not everybody has US$2500+ to spend on a mobile system that meets those requirements. US$100 for a Game Boy Advance system buys you an awful lot.
C'mon, now...the GBA raises a sub-NES quality game system to sub-SNES status now.
Bull. GBA is as powerful as the Super NES ever was, and it's easier to code for because of good C compilers for ARM (the Super NES's 65c816 is very NOT C friendly). It's even more powerful because GBA includes sprite scaling and rotation, which required Super FX acceleration on Super NES. We're talking 3DO or Saturn graphics here.
I saw people playing one of those ancient Atari 2600s a while back (ATTN: 70% of slashdot readers werent even born when these things were in use...so stop talking about them, they're DINOSAURS) -- it gave me a headache just looking at that awful blocky crap
Atari 2600 had backgrounds of 2 colors (out of about 16) per scanline and 40x100 pixels. It also had only 128 bytes of RAM and half a scanline's worth of VRAM. Heck, it was just barely Tetris-complete[?]. GBA, on the other hand, has a 240x160 display with 511 simultaneous colors and sprite scaling and 384 kilobytes of RAM.
If you want the best graphics, get GIMP, WinGIMP, or Photoshop. If you want the best animated 3D graphics, get a DVD player. If you want gameplay and don't want to waste money, get a GBA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
FYI, 'Mode 7' doesn't exist on the GBA, only a better implemenation that results in the same, but better effect
Mode 7 is rotation and scaling of background scanlines to produce planar 3D effects. See a demo of Mode 7-style effects here.
Will I retire or break 10K?
a paltry 160x120
160x144. Eighteen rows of twenty tiles each. Count the lines of text on the original Tetris®'s copyright screen (including the blank lines). Picky, but when you use numbers, you should use the correct ones.
If Sony ever decided to make a handheld device that could play PS One games (which has been rumored for years now)
Then they would need to invent shock protection like I've never seen. Kids. Drop. Game. Boys. And they use them in moving vehicles, where vibration and ever-changing effective-g directions are big concerns.
and a tinny sounding speaker to hear the grunts
Assuming you don't have it hooked up to the car stereo (with the big thumping 12" subwoofer; all your bass are belong to us) or Sennheiser headphones.
What I really want to see is a port of Zero Wing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Lynx, the Game Gear, the TurboGrafx Whatever and various and sundry PDAs have all been horizontal.
I believe what I'm thinking about was the Sega Genesis. I might be wrong on the name. It was portable, horizontally aligned and in color, and that was nearly a decade ago.
The one that played 8-bit Master System games was the Game Gear. The one that played 16-bit Mega Drive games (such as Zero Wing) was the Genesis Nomad.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This should be mentioned, if it hasn't already. There is a great gameboy advance development site at http://www.agbdev.net/gbadev/ You can find links there to demo's, and all sorts of tools and tutorials.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
You're right that the serial link between controller and console is probably not sufficient for real time video and you're also right that it's probably an undesirable user interface choice.
However, you could do a rear view on the GBA if you wanted. Who says you have to treat it as a dumb terminal and pour full-frame video to it? I'd write essentially the guts of a simple driving game on it, download that and the sprite data at the start of the race, and then just send the relatively small amount of info indicating position and so on each frame.
That said, I'd use it to indicate things like tyre pressures, distance to next/previous car, fuel level, overhead track view with green/yellow/red flag status, instructions from the pit and so on and so on.
Incidentally although I believe NFL2K does have VMU play calling, a screen as small and as low-contrast (partly because of the thick plastic frame on the Dreamcast controller, in my opinion) as the VMU is of limited use for that. You need enough pixels and colours to give some indicator of what the play actually does.
As for analog, I have no idea if Nintendo has done this, but the D-pad could be pressure-sensitive like the PS2 Dualshock2 controller's D-pad, face buttons and shoulder buttons. Personally I was also hoping for 4 front buttons on the GBA, too, but it's still a great piece of hardware even with 2 buttons and a (likely) digital-only D-pad.
Graham
Read and look before you comment. The GBA has 2 top buttons AND 2 shoulder buttons.
Yeah.. sure... gcc can compile for the arm7tdmi.. there has been som emus out for quite a time.. /Geggibus "yes he his"
It's even more powerful because GBA includes sprite scaling and rotation, which required Super FX acceleration on Super NES.
Rotoscaling did not require the SuperFX chip. The SuperFX was pure marketing hype. Very technically speaking, the SuperFX chip was nothing more than a 4, 8, or 12 mhz Math-Coprocessor which was added to some vector based games such as StarFox, FX Racing, and later, used to aid the Mode 7 hardware to set up the geometry for DOOM. (Bitmap rotoscaling was still handled by the Mode 7, but the vector surfaces were generatd by SuperFX, as best I understand it - a real hack.)
What's worse is that developers often refused to develope using SuperFX because including the hardware on the catridge increased the cost of the game (duh!).
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I want a portable Cowboy Neal Advance... pleaaaase ... but mooom!
The Jap. and the US releases are going to be exactly the same. You can buy the Jap. release right now, at either www.buyrite.com, or www.tronixweb.com. Happy gaming! :)
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Doesn't anyone else remember old Nintendo game watches? Pop eye, Donky kong etc. Check out www.gameandwatch.com.
-- Oliver Jones - Deeper Design Limited
Debian Potato sucks. Debian potatoed relwz
remember back in the 90's how much better those sega gamegears were? infinitely better gameplay, games, graphics, style, power usage, power sources, comfort, coolness, etc. Was there one single way in which gameboy was better than gamegear? no.
man, remember the days? gameboy was always the shitty toy, the second-best. remember when they came out with colour? oh no, it wasn't the games that were in colour, it was the translucent plastic on the machine.
and gameboy somehow won......
Fuck it
I got a problem with these game pads controllers, whether integrated or not in a console :
The arrow-keys are usually on the left while the action keys are on the right.
My problem is that I am used to playing with a computer keyboard on which the arrow-keys are on the right and the action key (space bar, etc) are left to these.
I am actually very bad with such inverted key configurations.
Is there a way to invert this or will I have to dismount the GBA case to invert the screen?
Of course, the best for me would be to have the opportunity to buy a "left-handed" GBA.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
I am a "non-fluent English speakers", but I don't think mistaking an adjective and a verb is a "pronunciation" mistake. Maybe it is a "grammatical" or a "syntactical" mistake.
;-)
You just proved that you don't need to be a "non-fluent English speaker" to make such mistakes. Maybe the next time you try to be so picky you will re-read your post before hitting the submit button
Angel
P.S.- Please, forgive all the mistakes in this post. I'm just a "non-fluent English writer" you know...
I think it could be a lot of fun develop things on. I think it development on it has many similarities to demo and game programming on the pc a few years ago.
You have a fast cpu but the rest of hardware is dump and couldn't do much for you and you have old compatiblity stuff all around you.
I think everyone that has some done some game/demo/gfx programming in 1994 or so should try to programm on it. The hardware is cheap and an selfmade flashrom adapter or a thing like this shouldn't be very hard to do, maybe it has already show up on the net.
I think you could do a lot of things you don't think to be possible if you do good asm optimizing and some register tweaking. (And you have two cpus !)
Jan
While it's true that Game Boy now has the handheld market pretty much to itself, I think the Game Boy franchise was actually starting to go rapidly downhill until this thing called Pokémon (or Pocket Monsters as it is called in Japan) single-handedly revived Game Boy sales, so much so that the revenue from the Pokémon franchise most likely paid for the development of the Game Boy Advance and the GameCube.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The problem with the original gameboy is that it had terrible sound, used sprites for graphics, and you could barely see the screen if you were looking at at an angle. Now we will be able to play "Doom" wen it comes. Gee, we can play an 8 year old game on a 2 inch screen. I'm going to rush out and get one.
You stupid bastard, you don't have no arms left. It's just a flesh wound.
Advanced game boy describes game boy as being advanced and thus, an adjective. It can also mean "to advance" which would make it a verb. All in all, "Advanced Game Boy" correlates to the meaning of game boy has made an advance again. This is true because of the evolution of game boy b&w to color and then to this state.
You stupid bastard, you don't have no arms left. It's just a flesh wound.
The writer wrote: It is the first to have a horizontal alignment which is WRONG! What about Game Gear? Lynx? Nomad? ALL of these were HORIZONTAL. The original game boy was the only one that came in a nice, compact, vertical package. I bet the only reason Gameboy Advanced came out in the format it is in was for room! I bet that, within a few years, they will be back to the original, classic Gameboy format, or a format simlar to the slimmer Pocket Gameboy.
Gorkman
From what I've heard the GBA as a controller will be used for changing settings and so on, that you want to keep secret from your friends. (With who you are playing multiplayer games (for example sport games) on one GameCube.)
The link will probably be quite fast btw, since there will be multiplayer GBA games, where only ONE cart is needed, the other GBA's will download the nessesary game code and data from the GBA with the cart using the link. The link must be fast so that this won't take forever. (With most multiplayer games you will be able to play only some levels with the download link though, for the rest you will need to have 2+ carts.)
"Kong" means "ape".
What language?
__
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
And Nintendo has actually released a list of about 25 games that doesn't work with the GBA...
I've got both a Game Gear and a Nomad. On the Nomad I like the Sonic series, Vectorman, and Earthworm Jim. The thing I really like about Nomad is the ability to hook it up to a TV with the video out, plus the ability to plug a second Sega joystick into the unit for two player games.
To combat the battery issue, I use the rechargable battery pack(it clips onto your belt). Of course, I've not used it in a while, so I suspect it won't hold a charge anymore.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
The general ordered the troops to advance. (verb)
The soldier asked for an advance on his paycheck. (noun)
The general sent in the advance troops. (adjective)
English allows words to change it's part of speech pretty easily, or, as my friend used to say "You can verb any noun in the language."
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324006
Here is the newsflash from Gameboy.com
The Gameboy made it this far with the help of good games, not cool technology. Go figure.
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Jeremy 'PeelBoy' Amberg
that no one has complained about the fact the Nintendo has, get this, more market share than Mircosoft products. I can't also believe that that no one has pointed out that gameboy is in fact inferior to it's competitors of the time. This all sounds so familiar.. where have I heard this scenario before?
Are you kidding? All they have to do is make 2 or 3 differently-colored pokemon cartridges for it and the things will sell like hotcakes! How do you think the Gameboy still sells today? Other than Pokemon and such, all they're doing is releasing color conversions of old Gameboy games that sold well.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
The SNES can only handle 256 colors
Unless you use the Super NES's additive and subtractive color modes, which make it relatively easy to display 4,096 colors in backgrounds. There are three scrolling planes with 16 colors each; set their palettes to redscale, greenscale, and bluescale and you can overlay them to produce lots and lots of pretty colors.
with 8xN sprite size
Super NES can display sprites up to 64x64. Up to 256 pixels of sprites can be on one scanline.
The GBA can even stream sound directly off the cart. (It doesn't have to be copied to RAM first.)
Heck, the 8-bit NES could do that; it was used for the drums in Contra and Super Mario Bros. 3 and for the explosions in Bomberman. Interplay's sound engine on Super NES could do something similar: streaming sound data from the cart to the SPC700's RAM while the game is playing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
-m
Actually the GB is usually regarded as a 1 Mhz system, (and the GBC as 2 Mhz, even Nintendo themselves says that they are 1/2 Mhz systems...), since the fastest instructions uses 4 clock-cycles to execute.
The 6502 architecture, used in NES and (in 65c816 form) in Super NES, requires anywhere from 2 to 6 cycles to execute an instruction, as it normally performs a memory access (to an 8-bit data bus) every cycle and apparently has only one ALU (no pipelining).
The slower instructions uses multiples of 4 cycles (8, 12, 16 and so on...)
Same with the Sega Genesis's 68000 processor, I'm told.
Will I retire or break 10K?
My NINTENDO Game and Watch Mario Brothers is horizontal alignment and that's what? Circa 1983 ish isn't it? Batteries lasted years - and it had a handy watch and alarm on it. What a ridiculous discussion, they were badly research, who cares???
I can't believe they haven't bought Nintendo yet!
Just a note, the review never calls the GBA flimsy. It calls the unit light, thin, and comfortable. But not flimsy. I think you misread "It too is tiny, and light, and thin" as "It is too tiny, light, and thin." Big difference.
Nintendo may own 99% of the handheld console market, but probably not of all handheld gaming. You can't forget all those Tiger handheld games, handheld casino games, fishing games, and even the Dreamcast VMU.
sorry, someone had to ask it.
but seriously what about JAVA. wouldn't that be great if someone ported it on the GBA ?
keep it simple.
I'd write essentially the guts of a simple driving game on it, download that and the sprite data at the start of the race, and then just send the relatively small amount of info indicating position and so on each frame.
Which means you'd still be decompressing the compressed data (in this case, sprite positions) on the GBA's puny 17 MHz processor. If you can make your rear-view scene simple enough to render in real-time on GBA, why not just release a GBA game instead?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, Nintendo was going to change the name, but the public (myself included) PREFERRED the name "Advance". So it stuck.
PlanetGamecube covers all things Nintendo, including Gameboy Advance. Check 'em out.
Anyone else think so? Remember those Tiger Game.com Pocket Pro units with the color cases? Hhmmmmm, makes me wonder if Nintendo looked at their competitors and copied some of the best features for the Game Boy Advance?
:)
Why not call it the Super Game Boy or Ultra Game Boy or even Advanced Game Boy instead of Game Boy Advance?
All your Game Boy are belong to us!
Not that I really care but to set some of you people straight. The Turbo Express was formed much like the original gameboy. It was not horizonal. It was like gameboy only larger. The screen was even the same size as gameboy only backlit color.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
Glad to see I wasn't the old one. "Why do you need to align an LCD.... Oh, dolt!" :)
cant wait till i get Gameboy Advance!
Hey ppls, do you thing you could visit my website? I've been wanting more ppl to go there so i thought i might try here
... I wonder what it takes for a company to be approved as a developer. Anyone know the criteria? track record? publishing deal? a pulse? :)
I mean, it could be fun to start-up a small shop that did games for this... There are more Gameboys then bacteria (it would seem at times) on this planet.
Scary thing is, the human brain contains a more-or-less complete reptilian brain for the same reason.
This has been done on the original GB too (with quite bad results...) All of these methods require CPU power though, the GBA has sound hardware that can read directly from the cart.
Actually, it only requires CPU power on the NES because the sound DMA hardware is on the same die as the CPU. Write to memory locations $4010-$4013 to set up a sound DMA and $4015 to set it going, and it plays without any intervention from the 6502 until either the sound ends or is halted, stealing a 6502 cycle every so often to fetch a byte of compressed sound data. Here's some more information about NES's sample hardware.
Will I retire or break 10K?