Game Boy Advance
SNES in your pocket
Nintendo's Game Boy Advance brought 32-bit power to handhelds, delivering SNES-quality gaming on the go with impressive battery life.
The Game Boy Advance represented Nintendo’s leap to 32-bit handheld gaming. The ARM7TDMI processor and improved graphics capabilities enabled ports and original games that rivalled the SNES. Backwards compatibility with Game Boy and Game Boy Color games protected existing libraries. The GBA dominated handheld gaming until Nintendo’s own DS superseded it.
Fast facts
- Manufacturer: Nintendo.
- CPU: ARM7TDMI at 16.78MHz.
- Screen: 240x160 pixels, 32,768 colours.
- Memory: 256KB WRAM, 96KB VRAM.
- Backwards compatible: Game Boy, Game Boy Color.
- Variants: GBA, GBA SP (lit screen), Game Boy Micro.
The end of hand-written Z80
The GBA’s most consequential change was not a specification. Edge visited Crawfish Interactive in Croydon in October 2001, a studio that had spent years shipping Game Boy Color titles, and the first advantage its people named was a subtraction: the machine “no longer requires developers to master an idiosyncratic version of Z80.”
What replaced it was one sentence long. “Programming-wise obviously it’s all written in C.”
The original Game Boy ran a processor that was Z80-like without being a Z80, and every game on it was hand-written for that dialect by people who had learned it and could not use the knowledge anywhere else. An ARM with a C compiler ends that. It also ends the value of the expertise — which is why the same visit finds Crawfish turning to the 16-bit back catalogue instead: Speedball II on GBA was built “based on the Bitmaps’ original Mega Drive and Amiga code”, one of the titles “being turned into potential revenue streams thanks to Nintendo’s 32bit architecture.”
A generation of Amiga and Mega Drive source found a second market on a handheld, because for the first time the handheld spoke the same language.
The limit was the cartridge, not the chip
The constraint developers actually fought in 2001 was commercial. Nintendo’s “cartridge pricing scheme” set the cost of the ROM a publisher had to buy, and Edge found the industry split by it: “for almost every publisher or developer eager to jump on the GBA bandwagon, there is another that has ruled Advance development out owing to the low margins.”
For the studios who did ship, it acted exactly like a hardware limit. “We might get squeezed on the amount of cartridge space that we can” use — a game’s size decided by a price list rather than by the machine.
Capabilities
What GBA could do:
- Mode 7-style effects: rotation and scaling.
- Sprite capabilities: 128 sprites, various sizes.
- Sound: 6 channels (4 PSG + 2 PCM).
- Link cable: multiplayer connectivity.
Library highlights
Notable GBA games:
- Metroid Fusion / Zero Mission: 2D Metroid excellence.
- Fire Emblem: series came West.
- Golden Sun: portable RPG epic.
- Advance Wars: tactical strategy.
- Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire: third generation.