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Gameboy Advance Frontlight Success

Posted by Hemos on from the moving-ahead dept.

skirch writes: "Remember Portablemonopoly.com? Well, Adam finally has a great working prototype (with some great pics) that he was able to hack together for about $30. Not that $30 is bad, but he mentions a possible group order, and I'm sure that would bring the price down quite a bit. He estimates that it will only diminish the GBA's battery life by 25-30%. Original Slashdot post."

8 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. This guy has style by kingdon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not only did he go off and build something instead of just whining, but I also was amused by the part from the mini-FAQ in which he responds to people who whine and complain and tell him he has it all wrong: "Enough already! I don't care whether or not you think what I am going is a waste of time. If you think this site is pointless or retarded, dear God save me the bandwidth and take your ass elsewhere."

    1. Re:This guy has style by pangloss · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I thought the same thing. Here's a (Score: 5) post from the original Slashdot article:

      A backlight won't help in the GBA's case. The LCD screen has reflective faceting to improve the visual quality (not to be confused with the reflective plastic cover that actually makes frontlighting the unit unbearable due to glare).

      Any light shone through the back will only succeed in "washing out" the colour due to the properties of the LCD. Personally I would have preferred an organic electroluminescent display (OLED) to this darkened LCD nightmare. OLEDs produce their own light and are more energy efficient than LCDs, let alone LCDs with backlighting.

      I'm glad Adam didn't give up on the basis of our informed community input ;) Cheers to the happy hacking spirit.
  2. It's too bad Nintendo didn't do this... by Jayde+Stargunner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's really unfortunate this wasn't implemented with the actual GBA. Engineered correctly (and maybe centered :-) this would solve many of the current GBA playability woes...and I'm certain Nitnendo could have made it more battery conservitive.

    Honestly, one is forces to use a plug-in light in almost all occasions--especialy with dark games like Circle of the Moon--so I can't think that a smaller interal light would havedrained more battery life that a Worm Lamp or Light Shield.

    And, if you think about it... Worm Lamp's and the life are only 10 bucks as standalone units, with plugins, plastic casing, and shipping materials. I can't imagine this would have raised the production cost of the GBA itself by more than 5 bucks.

    I would have gladly paid 5 bucks to make my GBA playable more than 10% of the time I feel like playing it. The screen has been the biggest deterrant for me finishing CotM and buying more than 2 games...

    But, of course... Nintendo really doesn't have to worry about another handheld coming along and being competitive. :-)

    -Jayde

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    1. Re:It's too bad Nintendo didn't do this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
      It's really unfortunate this wasn't implemented with the actual GBA. Engineered correctly (and maybe centered :-) this would solve many of the current GBA playability woes...and I'm certain Nitnendo could have made it more battery conservitive.

      Yes, it's very unfortunate. Seeing as i personally would be willing to pay even 2x the current cost of a GBA to get one i can actually play in below "optimal" light conditions. "Optimal" being in a situation where you constantly have a light directly above your GBA to light up the screen. This doesnt happen as much as you would like it to, which defeats the entire purpose of having a PORTABLE gaming system. I would wager, carrying a GBA around with you on a day-to-day basis, (which i do) the actual chances you get to play the thing is very slim, due to the so called "optimal" light conditions being very very rare. The fact that i can't play it in my bedroom with the light on shows a definate flaw in the gba design that nintendo really needs to fix to regain mine, and many others faith in the companys ability to produce systems worth purchasing.

      Portablemonopoly.com deserves a medal for doing what nintendo can't. This guy has done by himself, what a multi-billion dollar company was too lazy to research themselves. Kudos to portablemonopoly.com!

  3. what about another kind of hacking? by mj6798 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I keep wondering: the Game Boy Advance is based on a 32bit ARM, it's cheap, and it runs the Cygnus toolchain. So--has anybody ported Linux to it? Are there free development tools out for it? Where's a good place to start reading up on GBA development using standard open source tools (a brief search on Google didn't reveal much)?

  4. Re:Petition? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Honestly, most of these people were misled by the Gameboy commercials. They knew that it was not going to be backlit, but they thought that the screen would be more visable (remember that commercial that shows someone playing in a dark church?). Also some people are dissatisfied because they know that Nintendo could have made the GBA better, but chose not to. And others are dissatisfied because they could not get their money back.

    I was there on the IGN boards at day 1 when Adam bought his gameboy. He made quite an ass of himself there for a few weeks venting his dissatisfaction before he got tired of a number of us telling him to "fuck off for the love of God and leave us in peace", in not so many words. The petitition on his site is a leftover from when portablemonopoly.com was more of a "happy fun Nintendo slander and defamation corner" than a serious project. After many nasty replies on his message boards, he subsequently removed most of the slander, along with the boards. The petition is just a leftover from times past.

    I must say that I am happy to see that his site actually turned into something useful. I know many GBA fanboys breathed a sigh of relief when his project forced him to leave the IGN boards. But we never imagined he would be succesful :)

  5. Re:fun times by Dimensio · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Like others have said, Linux is the OS and they keyboard is used to interface the shell, not the OS.

    Besides, who knows, with the right tools/technology you might be able to hack out a cartridge that turns the GBA into a passable PDA -- at $99 that's pretty cheap and who knows what could be done through the link cable (true, getting *hardware* from the open source community might be difficult)

    There are already dev tools of some kind for the GBA -- a number of homebrew games have popped up, mostly to be used with emulation projects -- but I dunno how easily one could hack out a Linux port.

    Hell, perhaps you could turn a GBA into a really cheap webserver (er, if you could fit the site data onto something that would be compatable with the GBA cart slot or the link port).

    Oh, and I guess I should say: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

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  6. No Castlevania? by shadowcabbit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I find it very amusing that the games he uses to demonstrate the hack's effectiveness are Mario Kart and Advance Wars, two of the most colorful, vibrant games available. I have NEVER had any difficulty seeing the screen even in dim light while playing AW. I would be a lot more impressed if he had demonstrated Castlevania: Circle of the Moon.
    Or better yet, he should have just stopped tilting at windmills altogether. The dark color scheme problem is something that has to be worked around in software-- i.e. developers shouldn't choose varying shades of jet black on midnight blue as their color scheme. The GBA's difficult angles are just an added factor the developers and artists have to work around.
    And another thing, as long as I'm up on this soapbox. I realize that the intent of the hack was to "prove displeasure in the GBA" and prove some conspiracy-theorist-wet-dream "monopoly" on the handheld market. But there is a very simple reason why Nintendo has the only portable video game system currently, and it is the same reason why Sony has the leading console (for now) and why (gasp!) Microsoft has the leading OS. It is the software support. The GB caught on because of Tetris; the GBC because of Pokemon, and the GBA because of all of its launch titles (except maybe Iridion). PS2 has the best games released for it and coming for it (MGS2, Klonoa 2, FF10, need I go on?). Windows systems are popular because quite literally that's what everything runs on nowadays (I know there are exceptions, but I'm thinking within the context of gaming; the really big-name games are all for Win98 etc). In all cases, the "monopoly" exists because nobody bought the competition.

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