Nintendo Researchers Talk Next-Gen GBA

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to TotalVideoGames.com's report that initial details of technology for Nintendo's GameBoy Advance successor have been revealed - specifically, the screen design for future Nintendo handhelds. According to the report, Takeshi Kiyuna of Nintendo discussed his research at a recent technology seminar, and "..it's expected that the screen will offer a resolution of [at least] 300x200, supporting a color palette of over 260,000." Additionally, "..comments made later in the seminar suggested that Nintendo were looking into the possibility of implementing an organic electroluminescent (EL) screen, which allows for superior definition screens that require lower power demands on the battery."

Comments

Optical or Cartridge media?

[Daetrin]

That's the big question i have about the GBA2 or whatever they choose to call it. The size and nature of the screen is really of secondary importance.

Nintendo currently has a huge dominance in the handheld arena, in large part because of the huge number of games available due to backwards compatibility. However i'm worried that what we're looking at seems really similar to the end of the SNES era.

For better or worse, i think Nintendo is eventually going to have to switch over to optical media, unless the PSP completly bombs, but even then i think it will just delay the inevitable.

If the PSP maanges to get a foot in the door however due to a large amount of third party support, and Nintendo sticks with cartridge format, Nintendo is going to have set themselves up for a fall.

They could continue to stubbornly stick to cartridge format, just like the N64, and they'll slowly see their share start to slip. (Not as quick as with teh N64, because backwards compatibility will still do them some good.) On the other hand, they could decide to follow Sony's lead and switch to an optical disk format, at which point they're going to get slammed because the second generation PSP will presumably be backwards compatible and have a huge library of PSP games to draw on, while the new Nintedo optical handheld will have just lost it's backwards compatibility with the previous cartridge games. Sit back and watch the PS2 vs Gamecube situation happen all over again.

The second best solution to this problem that i can see is for Nintendo to switch over to optical disk format for the GBA2, but make sure that the disks are the same size as the Gamecube's disks. They'll be going head to head against the PSP, each with no backlog of playable games, but it will be better than waiting to make the switch. When the next generation comes out they'll hopefully have improved the design enough such that Gamecube games can be played on it directly. At that point the new GameBoy would have two large sets of games that it was backwards compatible with and hopefully crush the PSP.

The _best_ solution would be to bite the bullet, and spend a lot of money and research figuring out a way to make a system that could play both cartridges and optical disks without costing a fortune. The physics would be simple, at least if they did the intelligent thing like Sony and packaged the optical media in pseudo-cartridges like 3.5 floppy disks. Make the slot wide enough to hold a cartridge the size of a GameCube disk, with a notch cut out of the "bottom" edge to fit a GBA or GB cartridge. The optical media reader would be in the "top", and the cartridge interface would be at the back.

The complicated bit would be reducing the size and cost of having both types of hardware in the same machine.

Sound

[Jerf]

Personally, I'm most interested in the sound department. The GameBoy Advance's sound capabilities were underpowered, even by the standards of the time. Even Sonic Advance 2 (fairly recent) has the sound effects stomping on the music.

I'm hoping that they get something up to at least a wavetable type of sound with some decent number of channels. And panning that has something between "hard left", "hard right", and "dead center". And maybe a few effects tossed in... doesn't have to be some sort of full EAX, but you know, some cheap chorusing or reverb.

Both graphics and sound quality are asymptomptic curves to increase quality; the GBA is doing pretty well for its screen size in the graphics department, even in 3D now (it's never going to look like a Playstation 1 at that resolution), but the sound quality is so early 1990's. Giving the sound system 10 or 20 times the power of the GBA would really add a lot to the system, IMHO.

Next Gen GBA to-do list

[Mupp252]

1. Keep the backlight. (Unless you want people hacking your systems again.)

2. Add more buttons.

And.. umm... that's about all I can think of.