Game Boy Advance

Game Boy Advance is a handheld video game console from Nintendo. This
successor to the popular Game Boy can run almost all legacy GB software
(that is, software developed for Game Boy and Game Boy Color machines) and
new software developed for the more advanced capabilities of the system. It
has hardware support for simple 2D operations using graphical elements
called sprites. It can scale, rotate, sum-blend, and alpha-blend sprites
against a background (with one alpha value for the whole screen, not the
alpha-blending of image edges you see in the PNG format), and it can change
the scaling and rotation of sprites and the background on each scanline to
give a pseudo-3D effect.

It has a custom 32-bit 16.8 Mhz ARM processor based on a RISC architecture,
which is much more compatible with the C programming language than the 8-bit
Z80 compatible processor used in older Game Boy models. The ARM processor
can run both 32-bit ARM and 16-bit "Thumb" instruction set encodings. The
system also contains an 8.4 Mhz Z80 compatible processor to provide support
for legacy GB software; however, both processors cannot be active at the
same time.

The LCD display is capable of a maximum of 240x160 pixels in 15 bit color
(32768 colors). This display includes more pixels than Game Boy's 160x144;
when playing legacy games, the user can press the L or R button to switch
the display between 160x144 with a black border and scaling to 240x144
pixels. Early games had very dark color palettes because the display in the
development kits was much brighter than the one in the production units; the
production display has a gamma value of 4. Newer titles use gamma correction
in their palettes.

The GBA's picture generator has six display modes (three tiled and three
bitmap) and 96 KiB of dedicated RAM. In tiled display modes, the system can
manage four pixel-to-pixel layers, two pixel-to-pixel layers and one affine
layer, or two affine layers, and it uses 64 KiB of RAM for tile and map data
and 32 KiB for sprite cel data. In bitmap modes, it can display one large
16-bit bitmap, two 8-bit bitmaps (with page flipping), or one small 16-bit
bitmap (with page flipping), and it uses 80 KiB of RAM for tile and map data
and 16 KiB for sprite cel data. In all modes, it can show up to 128 sprites
(individually controllable small moving objects) of 8x8 up to 64x64 pixels
in either 4-bit or 8-bit indexed color. Each sprite can be drawn using
either direct pixel mapping or affine mapping; it's possible to fit more
direct sprites on a scanline.

The interface from the GBA unit to the ROM cartridge includes only a 24-bit
address bus multiplexed with a 16-bit data bus. (Mattel's Intellivision
console had previously used a multiplexed bus.) This setup limits the
directly addressable memory to 16 binary megawords (that is, 256 binary
megabits or 32 binary megabytes), but bankswitching hardware on the
cartridge can extend this by controlling the ROM's upper address lines from
software, effectively switching other parts of the ROM into the GBA's
address space. Still, as of 2003, no published GBA titles have such
bankswitching hardware because 32 MiB of ROM is still too expensive for the
price point at which most GBA games are sold.

The GBA also has a serial port for connecting to other GBA units in a setup
similar to a token ring network over a bus physical topology. In
single-cartridge multiplayer play, a GBA can also netboot up to three other
GBA units, where the machine with the cartridge sends up to a 256 KB
executable image to the internal RAM of the other machines. The serial port
can (with a suitable cable) also connect to a standard RS-232 serial port
for debugging purposes and (hypothetically) Internet play, although a TCP/IP
stack has yet to be implemented on the GBA.

Games released for GBA

By early 2002, hardware became readily available for moving user code onto
GBA hardware. For example, as of December 2001, a flash memory cartridge
plus writing hardware could be had for less than $200 US, and a $50 device
emulates a netbooting master. By April 2003, the prices had come down to
under $100 for the flash cartridge and writer and $30 for the boot cable.
Because of this, a homebrew software development community has sprung up;
see ( http://www.gbadev.org ). Nintendo however has a history of viewing
such devices as piracy tools, since they can be abused to copy cartridges
containing proprietary commercial software. In February of 2002, Nintendo
began sending threatening letters to some United States resellers of such
devices. Previous lawsuits had banned the importation of similar devices for
the 8-bit Game Boy.

In early 2003, the Game Boy Advance received an upgrade. Fulfilling the
wishes of gamers everywhere, Nintendo implemented an internal light, a
lithium ion battery (similar to that of most mobile phones), as well as a
folding case approximately half the size of the GBA. Unfortunately, Nintendo
removed the headphone jack, which had previously been on all GB models. This
folding case design is presumably to protect the screen. The new model is
called the "Game Boy Advance SP". The SP stands for Special.

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