Slashdot Mirror
Gameboy Advance Frontlight Success
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."
I thought that was Windows CE? Have I been misinformed?
The only big thing lacking on it was a lighted screen, from my POV, and this guy solved the problem. I'm very interested in this hardware hack for my own GBA.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Linux on a gameboy??? You're kidding me, right? I can see the use of putting Linux on a lot of other consoles (Dreamcast, etc) since you can attach a keyboard to them. But putting it on a Gameboy would be dumb since the only form of input you'd have would be the controller.
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."
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
What's a sig?
...who would rather just pay the $10 and get something like this:
p ro duct.asp?pf_id=201208
:p
http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/categories/products/
Cool mod, but I'm cheap. The $20 I'd save might let me buy some cool GBA game like "Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen's Big Adventure".
GBA emulator on a Palm m505...they are front lit and run for weeks on one charge. Expansion cards to save your game, etc.
GBA emulator on an iBook...wow, music and internet....output to your TV and go big screen.
Run the GB image to a HMD...5 ft. virtual floating image...now that's cool.
If nintendo would get off their asses and figure out that their GBA's biggest problem is light and not battery usage, they would put this into new GBAs right now.
I'm actually holding off on buying a GBA because I remember all those times with my ORIGINAL GB when I had to tilt the screen to see right and get contortions in my neck. When I heard there were light problems, that blew it for me. I was planning on buying one straight away before.
If nintendo put this into production, they would get my $120 I been holding for a couple months.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
The amazing thing is that no matter where I use my GBA it's too dark...
...except at work.
The lighting conditions are just perfect in my work-cell and it seems that's the only place I'm able to get any quality GBA time in.
"...but boss! I just can't see the screen at home or in the break room!"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I love that new commercial where the kid is playing with his GBA while at church (never mind all the class inferred by that... marketing weasels...). That is just absolute bullshit. I can barely play Tony Hawk 2 in my kitchen much less a room with low amounts of ambient lighting. They had to be filming that commercial looking at each other like... "Hey, it's not my lawsuit".
Adam is a deity. Nintendo owes every damn one of us an apology.
He (Adam) says it best when he comments that the glass covering the Worlds Most Useless Display is more like a mirror then anything else. So all the lame "Shark Lights, Wiggie Lights, PokoLights, Very Happy Joy Fun Lights" or whatever does nothing more then throw glare over the entire screen.
I'd pay thirty bucks to take something useless and render it otherwise.
is that you can't play it in bed without having the light on, making your girlfriend mad.
This hack has the potential to restore my relationship to pre-GBA goodness!
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
have not tested this myself yet, but goodGBX lists (and I have) the following rom:
Unix (PD).gb
size 32KB
ok, have looked at the file now... it is a simple emulation of unix, though I can't get past the login prompt (seems to have a built in password/username). A 'virtual' keyboard pops up (and can be hidden by pressing select I think)
:)
:P)
I doubt it is a genuine unix - just something to look cool. There is no init stuff, just straight into the login prompt. Bet it can't even run apache
(btw; I know, I know - I should have done this before posting the original message
Linux on a gameboy??? You're kidding me, right? I can see the use of putting Linux on a lot of other consoles (Dreamcast, etc) since you can attach a keyboard to them. But putting it on a Gameboy would be dumb since the only form of input you'd have would be the controller.
[sigh] Linux is an operating system. What you're used to typing 'ls' into is the shell. There is no reason whatsoever why the first program a UNIX init runs has to be a text login/shell. It could be anything. It could be something designed for a small screen, a couple of buttons and a joypad. No problem.
Furthermore, the GBA has a linkup port, you could probably hook a terminal up to it.
NB, the best reason I can think of for putting a UNIX on Dreamcast (Linux and NetBSD are both coming along well) is to eventually use it as a development platform for applications which do not require a keyboard (an xpilot port? please?).
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)?
Nintendo are pretty cool, but they have a pretty dodgy history of anti-competitive attitudes, and over pricing on some of their games stuff. I have to say though that this is less obvious this past while - rampant during SNES era though!
I'll bet if the games shops had 'dark' GBAs and 'lit' ones, even if the lit ones ate batteries twice as fast and cost 25% more the majority would go for the lit one. Nintendo should listen to this. I think they will. But first they will grind on with the dark GBA until it reckons everyone that REALLY wants one HAS one.
Then it will release the GBA 'lit' in a bunch of funky new colours, with no increased battery drain and sell a new GBA to a good %age of those who already have a 'dark' GBA. They will also release another Mario Kart at the same time. Just like Star Wars DVDs and collectors comics. Whenever you have a smallish market - just try to sell the same dumb ass the same thing more than once.
These guys are smart!
Our ultimate goal with this Web site is to measure the amount of dissatisfaction with the Game Boy Advance in the form of a petition. The results will be published on this site and, of course, sent to Nintendo and many other media entities.
If you're dissatisfied with the Game Boy Advance... Why did you buy one?
Fight the power that... uhh... provides you with video games...damn it!
Come on, this is along the lines of people who petitioned Prodigy to switch to the IP protocol suite (I hate when people call it TCP/IP)... Why not just change providers to one that gives you what you want?
I'm lucky that I ride the tube in London (the metro, for you yanks) every day to work. This gives me about 45 minutes to play Castlevania in perfect lighting conditions and then switch off and lose all my progress because I can't find a save room.
The only other place I've found the lighting conditions to be good was a carpark in Texas at midday. With the sun directly overhead the screen looks great! Unfortunately after a few days of this my pasty english skin burnt to an unhealthy red, my girlfriend was irritated and wouldn't take me out in public for a week.
Hmm.. check this out!
According to this page, Nintendo is planning a japanese release of a new GBA WITH backlit screen in december!
__ elacin
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!
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
After all, how can you live without video games?
People preorder Windows XP too, what can I say :-/
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-06 -13&res=l
This comic sums up how we've all felt.
There are number of such devices on the market allready. Some of them at: http://www.lik-sang.com/catalog/product_list.php?c ategory=48&
Who cares about a backlit GBA? Bring on the OLED version!
"the frontlight does not degrade the LCD's image quality when you compare it against a GBA in all but the most efficient lighting arrangements (i.e. a well-positioned lamp or a window with sunlight pouring in)"
So in this quest for light, he doesn't even consider the possibility of actually going outside? ;-)
The GBA only had 256K of RAM, so you would need a special cartridge that had additional RAM. No reason why it couldn't be done but the cost would be prohibative.
Also the ARM in the GBA does not have a MMU, so you would have to use ucLinux...
What do you know I wrote a novel
but from experience with playing gbc games on my AMD k6-2 400 at home, and P3 500 at work, the speed of the emu is comparable to that of the hardware. [strong added by yerricde]
You're comparing the Game Boy Color to the Game Boy Advance. Game Boy Color is about as complex as the old Nintendo Entertainment System to emulate, and LoopyNES (the most accurate NES emulator, available from Zophar.net's NES collection) runs at full speed on a P100. However, Super NES is about three or four times more complex as NES, and GBA is nearly twice as complex as Super NES, with two layers of Mode 7 and affine transformation (i.e. rotation/scaling) on every single sprite, but with two dumb but easy DMA channels for sound instead of a pain-in-the-ass SPC700 processor.
Here's a comparison of GBA hardware to that of the Super NES:
Read the rest of this comment...
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you're dissatisfied with the Game Boy Advance... Why did you buy one?
Because nintendo has a 95-year monopoly on games produced by Miyamoto's team, Rare, etc., and exclusive contracts with some publishers. By the time the games fall into the public domain, not only will the lifetime of the system have expired, but so will 99+ percent of the players.
Even ignoring the game design issue and assuming clones like Blizzard's Dia-blow and some freeware game are as good as Zelda(tm), the other portable systems available in stores located in the United States of America (Palm, WinCE, etc.) have input devices that don't work for games and must be tethered to a $1000 PC that 13-year-olds can't afford with paper route income and that their parents think is THE DEVIL!
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Whether or not Nintendo is actually planning a lit GBA, I don't know, but I do know that they won't be doing it backlit. The type of display used in the GBA is a REFLECTIVE lcd. That means that it needs light from the front in order to be visible. If it has light coming in from the back, all you see is white, and your world is woe.
Notice, portablemonopoly.com keeps talking about "frontlight solutions".
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
Your first duty is to justice - not the systematic killing of poeple who have nothing to do with your plight. You'd do well to remember that. Random killing is not your duty - it's a mockery of the systems.
Sounds like a man in-the-know, doesn't it?
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...