New Gameboy Advance?

[Myname]

Just posted this over on NX, but since no-one goes there here it is.

 

[Curtis]

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?

 

[antime]

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.

 

[mal]

I think it's great that it might look like the old Game and Watch handhelds.

 

[valkyrie999]

well,

don't think of it as an upgrade:

without backlight, the gba is almost unplayable...

 

[ExCyber]

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.

I think delays have less to do with GBA having "outdated" hardware than the fact that it was quite carefully designed to have 10+ hours of play time on 2 standard AA cells.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.

A larger ROM-space would also bring both improved graphics and sound.

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]

Originally posted by ExCyber@Oct. 10 2002, 5:22 pm

I think delays have less to do with GBA having "outdated" hardware than the fact that it was quite carefully designed to have 10+ hours of play time on 2 standard AA cells.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.

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.

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.

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.

 

[antime]

A scan of the story in Edge. Contrary to my guesses it suggests the new machine might be released as soon as November/December.

 

[mal]

Just in time for Christmas.

 

[Gallstaff]

wow that is one of the gayest things i've ever seen in my entiere life... hey it reminds me of the gameslave...