Java for the Gameboy Advance

heavy writes "For everyone who is wondering what else they can do with their newly purchased Gameboy Advance SP comes JAMiD - Java Action Media Interactive Device. What is it? "The aJile Systems JAMiD JAM-ID100C cartridge will turn your Nintendo® Game Boy Advance or Game Boy Advance SP system into a jammin' Java interactive gaming machine capable of playing those free Java games popping up all over the Internet. Based on Sun Microsystem's J2ME Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP), the JAMiD accelerated Java platform will run MIDP 1.0/2.0 games and other multimedia MIDlets." It can also play MP3s...a developer version available now and a consumer version is coming soon. Way cool."

Comments

Code Warrior Wireless studio for free

[asmithmd1]

Motorola bought Metrowerks and for a limited time you can download a full version of Code Warrior wireless studio for free. All you have to do is sign up at Motocoders This is a full featured IDE that is all set-up for J2ME development

Homebrewing

[Anonymous Coward]

Im a homebrew developer for the GBA and the GBA is very easy to program for as it is. I belive this may just be a bottleneck in speed for the already slow ARM7 processor it has. The GBA does not have any 3D acceleration hardware (it shouldnt, it has incredible 2D capabilities which is it's market), so i think Java3D would also be out of the question. This may be a good way to let the people who have never worked on an imbedded system port there own projects very quickly, but if you know JAVA, try doing C for GBA. http://www.gbadev.org is a great place for finding out news on the GBADEV scene, as well a forum with many intelligent programmers and artists. http://www.ngine.de is home of the HAM development kit which for sompe people is very good. Also on EFnet there is the #GBADEV channel. There are usually about 50 people there at any given time.

JAMiD Information

[jetkust]

This story has a lot of information on it. The main site i believe has been slashdotted.

Re:J2ME

[gl4ss]

maybe midp2.0 has some 3d(haven't checked into that), but midp1.0 does not(which is what the phones available on the market now support).

in fact the gfx abilities of it are pretty limited(you get basic primitives and can plot images and basically that's it), though there's properiaty extensions for example nokia phones that allow some 'cooler' stuff, like plotting array of pixels straight to screen, but lacking such 'features' never made it impossible to code some great games on older systems before.

however, it's very easy to (start to) develop midlets because it's so limited, and on the other hand it has an oldschool feeling because you can't assume the system has megabytes of memory for spare, and missing floating points it's time to dig up all those old fixed points libs you've had and refresh your memory. and provided that you take different screen sizes into consideration and different screen depths(that is, you don't hardcode it to look right on just one size screen) you will have it running on quite big amount of mobile devices without porting it spesically to every machines quirks(in theory at least, in practice as well)..

the biggest hurdle i find that j2me games have is that most midp1 devices allow only 1 key to be pushed down at a time (this makes input for jump'n'run and such games a bitch).