Slashdot Mirror
Gamecube Finally Plays GBA Games
ytzombe writes "Gamespot News is reporting that for about 5000 yen an attachment will be available to play GBA games on the Gamecube. The serial port underneath the system will be the gateway to the device and will include a port to enable multiplayer games. This will finally allow me to play the Castlevania games without fusing my naked retina to the screen."
i already bought the GBA "cybernetic upgrade" tv adapter on a trip to hong kong.. it's not licensed by nintendo though, it makes your GBA big and bulky, requires it's own power source, and costs about the same..i just installed it on a second GBA that i had laying around (they're very cheap in asia). look into it if you don't have a gamecube but you are as annoyed with the GBA screen (w/no afterburner) as many other people are.
No. This negates the need for a Game Boy Advance completely. It comes with an emulator disc and the hardware part is just a cartridge reader. So, it's a $44 attachment for the $150 console to play games that are around SNES quality (not NES, that was the Game Boy Color)
This will finally allow me to play the Castlevania games without fusing my naked retina to the screen.
Or, if you're feeling particularly ambitious, you can install Triton Labs' Afterburner lighting kit.
Sure, you'll have to open up your GBA and do some (very easy) soldering, but if you're reading Slashdot, chances are that you either
A) Can solder in your sleep
B) Are smart enough to find someone who can solder if you're not up to the challenge, rather than fuck up your GBA by trying anyway.
The end result is worth it. Clear visibility in any lighting, even complete darkness! Sure, there's a modest drain on the batteries, but you'd get the same drain using an (inferior) external lighting solution. Plus, you can opt to install the potentiometer (included) to allow you to dim or turn off the light when not needed.
Sure, you can buy the attachment to play GBA games on the GC, but why? The main reason to buy a Gameboy is portability. If you want to play the games on a large screen, get an emulator.
No, the article is about a way to play GBA games on your NGC sans GBA. Metroid Prime uses the link cable with the GBA to do two things -- beat Metroid Prime and link to Metroid Fusion, and you can play the game using Samus' new Fusion suit. Beat Metroid Fusion and link the two, and you can play the original Metroid on the GameCube. (I may have those reversed on what you have to do to get each, but those are the two things you get.) Since you need to have the Prime disk in the NGC to access these features, and you have to use an emulator disk with this peripheral, I don't believe you're going to be able to connect the NGC back to itself via the GBA link cable. It'd be kinda sweet if you could, but that would mean the peripheral itself would just be a GBA that sits under the cube and hooks into the cube's A/V outputs, which it's not.
There is a boot disc that makes the Gamecube AWARE of the device, it's more of a device driver, but the actual GBA functionality is all hardware based. Games like Metroid Fusion that can talk to GameCube games will NOT need to have this disc loaded beforehand. The games are aware of the GBA carts in the add-on and can and will read directly from the memory of the GBA game in question. Again, NOTHING is being "emulated" with the Gameboy Player, you will just need to load the device driver disc to play the games beforehand. But you WILL NOT need to use it when using Gamecube games that use GBA linkups because thats already in the Gamecube software itself.
The GBA and the SNES are completely different hardware. They're roughly equivalent in power (each has some strongpoints over the other), which is reason they get compared so much.
I forget the exact model number, but the SNES processor is a 16 bit version of the 6502 (the chip in the NES). The GBA uses an ARM processor (and also has a Z80 in there to run the old GB/GBC games).