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Nintendo Bundles GBA Adaptor With Gamecube
Thanks to a multitude of sites for pointing to a new Nintendo press release announcing they're bundling the Gameboy Player with the Nintendo Gamecube system, starting June 23rd. The Gamecube will keep its US price of $149 for this added-value deal. For those unsure about what the Gameboy Player is, the press release explains it's "..a platform less than an inch thick, which acts as a base for the Nintendo GameCube. By simply inserting Game Boy cartridges [GB/GBC/GBA] into a slot in the Game Boy Player, consumers can use their Nintendo GameCube controller to direct action on the TV screen."
How long before someone finds a way to use them as cheap ROM dumpers?
That is of course if Australia ever sees the bundle.
The Gameboy Advance and the Gameboy Advance SP are the same platform. Just a diffrent form factor. They both play exactly the same games.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Neither.
p layer/
It's the GB Player. It's a little device that plugs into the bottom of the gamecube.
There's picture and an article here:
http://www.gamespy.com/hardware/march03/gb
It lets you play gameboy games on the gamecube, with a gamecube controller.
One great aspect of this is it will allow big-screen, front-room access to wonderful games like Advance Wars and its imminent sequel - games which have far more depth than the majority of PS2/GC/Xbox titles, but don't stand a chance of being released on any of the 'proper' consoles because they're 2D, "old school", blah blah blah. Hell, until its big brother shows up, Mario Kart Advance is flat-out the best 'fun' racer you can play on the current platforms. Yeah, that's like having a SNES in your front room (no bad thing), but a great game is a great game, just like a poor one is a poor one, regardless of poly count and shaders. Truth be told, this will probably lead to my GBA games taking up far more screen time than their GC shelfmates. Bonus.
Actually, to be very technical they are just a tiny tiny bit different. They are different enough that a cart can detect which model gameboy it's in by code (and it's not just some sort of query that returns "gameboy sp" - afaik, that sort of direct determination is not possible) -- some homebrew code is using the detection to slightly alter a game's color pallette to account for differences between the way colors look onscreen between the GBA and the GBA SP.. But other than that, there's no difference between the units and all code is 100% compatible.
The introduction of the GBA SP undoubtadely left Nintendo with an overrun of original GBA product either pre-assembly or pre-shipment. Although I havent seen a site posting the innards of a Gameboy Player unit for the GameCube, I would bet that it contains a repurposed GBA motherboard.
~GoRK
Come on Nintendo. You know you could do it.