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

A Great Day For Mankind

[Anonymous Coward]

This is fucking awesome! I am so happy about this, I just crapped my pants! But don't worry, Java has automatic garbage collection so I won't even have to change myself!

J2ME

[FortKnox]

J2ME has become extremely popular with most handheld devices. Most new PDA's and Mobile Phones contain some variation of the J2ME. So if you are an ambitious entrepreneur (maybe dreaming of getting into the gaming industry?), J2ME may be your ticket. J2ME (IIRC) comes with J3D (at least it does in the Zarus), so there is a lot you can do with it.

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).

Re:J2ME

[mattbee]

So if you are an ambitious entrepreneur (maybe dreaming of getting into the gaming industry?), J2ME may be your ticket

Ugh, I hope not... after a few weeks of developing a pretty simple J2ME game for mobile phones I'm not a fan. You're at the mercy of the MIDP implementation for many quite basic game functions like sound, transparent sprite support, pixel operations and some IO bits and pieces. And Java is just the wrong language when (in the case of the Nokia 3410) you have to limit your total jar size to 50K but still try to write portable code which'll still be relevant on the top-end whizzy colour phones. Every frigging class takes another few precious bytes from your artwork / set of trivia questions, but what can you do? Trying to write less classes really isn't something Java is built to support so I've ended up writing a pre-processor to generate different source trees for each slightly different mobile platform, and the build, test & turnaround times are subsequently horrendous. Though this is just endemic to embedded development, having to run your code & graphics through three or four different Java-based tools to generate a finished product is painful.

On the other hand, your unmodified GBA can be connected to a PC very cheaply to quickly upload demos to its RAM, or to use it to write images to flash cartridges for more substantial pieces of work. Use gcc and a few well-researched documents around the internet and you can get at the full graphics & sound capabilities of the GBA. It makes for much simpler to understand code which can gets results quickly: the portability aspect of Java in embedded devices seems to be a real red herring.

So, umm, to bring the ramble to a close, Java might be nice where you have a roughly similar set of platforms to deploy on, but where your back-end APIs and deployment platforms can vary as wildly as MIDP-supporting devices can, it demands you write pre-processors and other things that are anathema to the language. So if you're after the GBA to showcase a game idea (and I still think it's a great platform for that) you'll get much better results in C.

Re:J2ME

[mlk]

maybe midp2.0 has some 3d(haven't checked into that)
Nope, JSR 184 covers it, and has quite wide support (Nokia, Sun, Motorola, Matsushita & Sony) reading the voting for it, it sounds like the 3D support is based on OpenGL.
and missing floating points
You can get MathFP to get round that problem.

Not just games

[bsharitt]

I'm sure this won't just be for games. It might even turn out to be possible to add cheap PDA functionality to a GBA too.

Re:Not just games

[RexRuther]

But why? A PDA is better suited for PDA work and a GBA for games.

Re:Not just games

[bsharitt]

Some people who use a PDA a lot, but don't play games enough to justify buying a GBA might play games on their PDA. The same goes for people who play their GBA a lot, but don't need a PDA enough to buy one, but might need that functionality occasionly.

Re:Not just games

[generic-man]

Why install a whole Java VM to get an address book, calendar, etc.? There's already a cartridge that does it for $10.

Re:Not just games

[MeanE]

Mamma miea...you hava an emale. Would you like to read it now or duel it with your pokemon.

Re:Not just games

[zangdesign]

"Some people who use a PDA a lot, but don't play games enough to justify buying a GBA might play games on their PDA. The same goes for people who play their GBA a lot, but don't need a PDA enough to buy one, but might need that functionality occasionly."

it's so 8-year olds can remember to make their crack hookup on the fifteenth at 3 a.m., their parole board appt. at 9 a.m., and show off their "mad skilz" at 4 p.m. and STILL not forget to pick up a load of bread and a box of 9mm at the corner convenience store for their grandma.

Seriously, isn't there a law of diminishing returns on doing something just because you can?

hmm

[Masami Eiri]

Should prove to be interesting. How will one put the games on the cartidge though? That would require a specially built device for it, which would either require money or scrapping another GBA.

still cool though.

Re:hmm

[jkeyes]

It's called Flash Advance or Flash 2 Advance, besides being able to flash GBA games you can also flash homebrew stuff so I don't see why it wouldn't work for this although I've yet to see it because the site is going slow as crap. You can read up on flash advance and its friend Flash 2 Advance at the following sites:
http://www.flash2advance.com
http://www.g baemu.com

Pretty nice

[shayborg]

I have doubts about the actual utility of this sort of thing for something like PDA functionality, just because the GBA is really not designed for text manipulation. Games could be cool, though ... I'd love to play that Java Qix game I found the other day on my Game Boy. :-)

-- shayborg

pretty cool

[ih8apple]

Here's a Java Applet which can run GameBoy software.

Therefore, (if the applet's updated to run the GBA SP software), you can run Java applications on your Java GB emulator.

JVM on GB on JVM on GB on JVM..........

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

Re:Code Warrior Wireless studio for free

[hoop33]

FWIW, the download had me in a vicious cycle--I registered, logged in, went to the page, clicked the link to download . . . and would be taken to the login page again. This happened in both Mozilla 1.3 and IE 6.

After a few rounds of that, I tried passing my user name/password in the URL of the tools page (...?userName=XXX&password=YYY) (No, not my real id/pw) and it worked.

YMMV

Bluetooth

[FortKnox]

Now, I just heard this from an EB manager, but he said the plans are for the next Gameboys to have bluetooth in them to allow multiplayer without any cords. This would make it like calculators where you can just 'beam' (non-cartridge)games/apps to other people.

Re:Bluetooth

[Dr_LHA]

Actually they dumped the IR port for the GBA, it's only on the GBC. Also it couldn't be used as a replacement for the GBC link cable - it was only available for use if programmed into specific games and was hardly ever used.

As for the original poster, I would take any information from a "EB manager" as nonesense as these guys have no real insider knowledge, although its nice speculation.

For lack of better specs...

[GoRK]

Note that this almost certainly has its own internal CPU for this as the gba's internal CPU is not up to task - especially with the bitmapped (framebuffer) modes that a java interpreter would demand. Still, a very neat application.

As close to java as you can get on the gba? There are some waba VM's out there... here is one:

http://www.badpint.org/jaysos/

Please insert ...

[DogIsMyCoprocessor]

standard joke about how, judging by the Web sites response time, they must be running their Tomcat servlet engine as a midlet on one of their JAMiD cartridges.

what i want to see

[Photon01]

what id really like to see is the ability to download video onto a gba cartridge and play it back.

It would be great to be able to take an anime episode or two somewhere with me. It seems to me that the GBA screen, especially the SP's lit one would be great for playing back anime.

Re:what i want to see

[yerricde]

The flash cards for the GBA seem to go as high as 512MB

The largest GBA flash carts have 512 megaBITS, not megabytes. And nobody makes the decoder chips yet.

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.

Re:Homebrewing

[Dr. Bent]

I read this article a while ago (seems to be slashdotted now), and as I recall, this cartridge has a native Java CPU (one that runs the bytecode directly, as opposed to in a VM) so it should be only slightly slower than an equivlent C application.

I think the main use for this technology will not be writing games solely for the GBA, but as a platform "porting" path for J2ME cell phone game developers.

JAMiD Information

[jetkust]

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

When will swing be ported

[Billly Gates]

Its such a lean, elegant, and fast that its perfect for a lightweight solution like an old gameboy.

Hooked

[Mattygfunk1]

I love the power and the flexibility of the gameboy. My problem? Tetris keeps sucking me back in.

Nintendo, PLEASE LET ME LIVE.

It started out fairly innocent. My brother offered to let me play one night on his. "Just a few games..." he used to say. It's like crack, and I was hooked. I'm now 22 and it has consumed my life. I have tried quitting cold turkey, but it was like the sky was falling and not fitting into place.

If they would only go one generation without it I might have a chance.

__
cheap web site hosting on linux

Can't Wait to Hear:

[OctaneZ]

Boss: "waht are you doing there?"
Worker: "I'm coding boss! I swear!"
Boss walks away...
Worker (hushed tones): Damnit the wizard got me again

aJile has a really nice processor there

[Headius]

I've been developing embedded Java solutions for the aj-80 and aj-100 for about 5 months now, and I must say they are nice little processors. Very fast, very solid resource management, and a solid selection of APIs.

This is another cool innovation from aJile, I hope we'll see more like this. Now if the embedded side of J2ME development would take off, the world would be a much nicer place!

very very cool!

[smd4985]

i'm most impressed. obviously having J2ME support for the GBA is a smart move by Nintendo (i bet they are setting up developers for their next GB, which is rumored to have wireless support built-in). allowing consumers to access the java API is even more impressive - smart idea for allowing home-grown innovations to blossom.

i put off getting a GBA SP but i'll grab one as soon as the java access is available.

Advertisment

[LS]

This story smacks of advertisement. Who uses "jammin" as slang, except for copy writers and advertising executives?

LS

MP3's?

[LS]

I get a sick feeling in my stomach when I hear about yet another device with virtually no memory that can now play MP3's. Who gives a rat's ass? I guess teenagers who listen to the same song over and over might like this feature.

LS

Moo

[Chacham]

Kewl. I wonder if someone will port a Gameboy Emulator to it. :-)

Looks like..

[CausticWindow]

mobile gaming is going to save Java. At least for now.

You know that a technology is sound when it is supported by Ericsson, Nokia and er.. Nintendo.

Re:What I'd like...

[meloneg]

...is a z-code VM, not a Java VM, so I can play the hundreds [wurb.com] of games already available - some of very high quality. Might need a keyboard port too though.
Ask and though shalt receive.
Isn't google grand?

Already done, just get this cart

[Chairboy]

Just get the Mary-Kate & Ashley Pocket Planner:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 04YMSV/qid=1050343992/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/104-475058 0-6665505?v=glance&s=videogames

Z-code VM on the GBA

[yerricde]

What I'd like... is a z-code VM

You mean like Frotz for GBA?

Re:What I'd like...

[arose]

GBA Frotz, seems to have a rather nice keyboard emulation too.

Even worse

[jvalenzu]

what's worse even than that is the fact that you can buy a pad of paper and pencil for like $3.

A more versitle solution?

[veredox]

I realize that the goal of this project was not to provide a versitle solution but rather to allow existing MIDP games to be played on the GBA. However, I think it would be fun to write a JVM for the GBA that would allow you to run any (okay not any, but with less limitation) java application or applet MIDP or not. Also, rather than having to buy a cartridge with its own processor, why shouldn't the program be run on the GBA's processor and loaded from a standard cartridge or even a multiboot cable. Slow? Yeah, it would be slow. There's no question about that. But it would certainly be more in the spirit of Java. I've started a sourceforge project to try and tackle this task. If you are interested in helping out, please inquire there.