Just posted this over on NX, but since no-one goes there here it is.
New Gameboy Advance?
- Thread starter Myname
- Start date
Oooh sounds nifty - from what I've heard the screen was the weakest link on the old GBA. Dunno about the "new improved" processor tho'...Wouldn't that just wreck compatibility with older GBA's and newer games? Maybe it's just rumor...
edit: Hello post 1000 - nice to meet you
Will I see you at the 2000th post party?
edit: Hello post 1000 - nice to meet you
antime
Extra Hard Mid Boss
If they're already planning a new Gameboy I doubt it will appear soon. Obsoleting the machine too fast will generate a backlash like the one Sega suffered after the MegaCD/32X.
That said, it is not all that unlikely that they're designing a new machine. The release of the Gameboy Advance was already delayed by at least a year as Nintendo milked Pokèmon so it wasn't a "current" design by the time it appeared on the market. Additionally Nintendo may have misjudged what people (esp. developers) wanted from the hardware. It has quite good 2D (almost identical to the Saturn in many aspects) but there are many 3D games already released and in development. Hardware 3D acceleration isn't an absolute necessity, but an upgraded processor and memory architecture would go a long way. A larger ROM-space would also bring both improved graphics and sound.
That said, it is not all that unlikely that they're designing a new machine. The release of the Gameboy Advance was already delayed by at least a year as Nintendo milked Pokèmon so it wasn't a "current" design by the time it appeared on the market. Additionally Nintendo may have misjudged what people (esp. developers) wanted from the hardware. It has quite good 2D (almost identical to the Saturn in many aspects) but there are many 3D games already released and in development. Hardware 3D acceleration isn't an absolute necessity, but an upgraded processor and memory architecture would go a long way. A larger ROM-space would also bring both improved graphics and sound.
well,
don't think of it as an upgrade:
without backlight, the gba is almost unplayable...
don't think of it as an upgrade:
without backlight, the gba is almost unplayable...
I think delays have less to do with GBA having "outdated" hardware than the fact that it was quite carefully designed to have 10+ hours of play time on 2 standard AA cells. This limits both circuit complexity and clock speed.
As far as I know, no GBA game exists that is even half the size of the current limit (32MB/256Mb). The big limitations on graphics and sound are the DAC/speaker quality and screen resolution.
antime
Extra Hard Mid Boss
True, but had the design work started two years later than it did the machine would probably have a different feature set, at least to some degree.
Some developers have planned games with spoken dialogue and while speech can be compressed quite well you would still run out of space pretty fast. Sample size for music is also limited and longer animation sequences are a no-no. 3D games could also fit larger maps and more preprocessed data in bigger ROMs.
One solution is of course to start using bank switching, but I can't see Nintendo warming to that idea.
