For twelve years, programming a Game Boy meant writing assembly language for Sharp’s 8-bit processor, a relative of the Z80 with its own quirks. The Game Boy Advance changed that. Nintendo put a 32-bit ARM7TDMI processor inside, and studios such as Crawfish Interactive began writing their handheld games in C. The old 8-bit processor was still there too, so every Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridge kept working.
Nintendo unveiled the machine at Spaceworld in Tokyo on 24 August 2000 and launched it in Japan on 21 March 2001 at ¥9,800. Held sideways like a joypad, with a 2.9-inch colour screen in the middle and two shoulder buttons, and its graphics could do the scaling and rotation that had made the Super Nintendo’s Mode 7 famous. Nintendo counts 81.51 million sold across the original model, the front-lit SP and the tiny Micro.
Fast facts
- Manufacturer: Nintendo.
- Launched: Japan 21 March 2001 (¥9,800); Europe and Britain 22 June 2001.
- CPU: ARM7TDMI at 16.78 MHz, running 32-bit ARM or 16-bit Thumb instructions.
- Second CPU: the Game Boy Color’s 8-bit processor, at 4.2 or 8.4 MHz, used only for older cartridges.
- Screen: 2.9-inch reflective TFT colour LCD, 240×160 pixels, no backlight.
- Colours: 32,768; 511 at once in normal tile-based play, all of them in a bitmap mode.
- Memory: 32 KB of fast on-chip work RAM, 256 KB of slower work RAM, 96 KB of video RAM.
- Sprites: 128, up to 64×64 pixels each.
- Sound: the four Game Boy sound channels plus two channels of 8-bit digital samples, in stereo through headphones.
- Power: two AA batteries, about 15 hours by Nintendo’s figure.
- Sales: 81.51 million including the SP and Micro (Nintendo).
Written in C
In October 2001 Edge visited Crawfish Interactive in Croydon, a studio that had shipped a long run of Game Boy Color games. The first advantage its people named for the new machine was that it “no longer requires developers to master an idiosyncratic version of Z80”.
“Programming-wise obviously it’s all written in C,” founder Cameron Sheppard told Edge. “You can go to assembler, which is a lot more complicated than the Z80, and there are a few programs that are probably more suited to assembler than C, but for all our projects there are so many more advantages on the GBA compared to the GBC.” His development director, Martin Merren, put it in terms of time: “because it’s in C you can get stuff up and running so much quicker”, which let the studio show a publisher a working demo early.
The original Game Boy’s processor was a Sharp chip that looked like a cut-down Z80 to people who knew one, and games for it were written close to the hardware. An ARM with a C compiler brought handheld development closer to the way games for home machines were built. It also made older games easier to bring over. Edge found Crawfish converting Cinemaware’s Wings and signing a deal with the Bitmap Brothers. Its Speedball II for the GBA “uses Mega Drive and Amiga code”. Edge called this “typical of the way back catalogues are being turned into potential revenue streams thanks to Nintendo’s 32bit architecture”.
Tiles, bitmaps and rotation
The display hardware has six modes. Three are built from tiles, like the Super Nintendo’s: up to four scrolling background layers in mode 0, and fewer layers in modes 1 and 2 in exchange for backgrounds that can be rotated and scaled, the effect the SNES called Mode 7. The other three are bitmaps, where each pixel has its own value in video memory. Mode 3 gives every one of the 240×160 pixels its own 15-bit colour. Mode 4 uses one byte per pixel, choosing from a palette of 256, and has room for two screens so a game can draw one while showing the other. Mode 5 trades resolution for colour and a spare screen at 160×128.
Nintendo’s own launch guide described the result in plainer terms. The machine could show all 32,768 colours at once in a bitmap mode “used to present still images”, and “during normal game play, it can display 511 different colors at one time”. It could “keep track of and display 128 moving objects at once”. A game could also ignore the tiles and draw every pixel itself in a bitmap mode, at the cost of the processor time and memory that took.
The limit was the cartridge price
The constraint studios fought in 2001 was commercial. Publishers bought their cartridges at prices Nintendo set, 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 offered by Nintendo’s cartridge pricing scheme.”
For studios that did ship, the price list acted like a hardware limit. “We might get squeezed on the amount of cartridge space that we can use, and the possibility of battery back-up,” Merren said. How big a game could be, and whether it could save, depended on what the publisher was willing to pay per cartridge.
The screen, the SP and the Micro
The screen had no light of its own. Nintendo’s launch guide was open about it: “The reflective quality of the screen requires that you have an ambient light source, such as a room light or sunlight”, and a backlit screen “would be more expensive, drain your batteries much faster”. Players still complained. By December 2001 Edge listed “heavy criticism of the reflective screen” beside high software prices as the machine’s problems, even as sales ran strongly. Japan sold 650,000 on the opening day and Europe 1.5 million within months of its 22 June launch.
Nintendo’s answer was the Game Boy Advance SP, which reached Europe on 28 March 2003. It folded shut like a Game & Watch, weighed 143 g, ran on a rechargeable lithium battery and had a front-lit screen. Inside, Edge reported, “the internal architecture of the platform will be absolutely identical to the standard GBA”. It also had no headphone socket, and Edge called that omission “incomprehensible”. Nintendo’s figures count 43.57 million SPs, more than half of all Game Boy Advance sales.
The last model, the Game Boy Micro, was shown at E3 in 2005 and released that September. It was smaller still and played only Game Boy Advance cartridges, not the older Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.
Sales and later history
Nintendo’s figures give the Game Boy Advance family 81.51 million sales: 16.96 million in Japan, 41.64 million in the Americas and 22.91 million elsewhere, with 377.42 million games. The original Game Boy line, at 118.69 million, remained larger.
Its successor overlapped with it. The Nintendo DS of 2004 had a slot for Game Boy Advance cartridges, and the Australian magazine Hyper explained in 2005 why they looked different on it: the DS “has two CPUs — an ARM9 and ARM7”, and GBA games appear letterboxed because its screens are 256×192 against “the GBA’s 240x160 screen”. Game Boy Advance games returned again in February 2023, in the Expansion Pack tier of Nintendo Switch Online.
Sources
- Edge issue 89, October 2000, p. 6: the Spaceworld 2000 unveiling, the screen, batteries, shoulder buttons, stereo PCM sound, backward compatibility, and the Japanese date and price.
- Edge issue 97, May 2001, news: the Japanese launch on 21 March 2001 and 2.7 million pre-orders.
- Edge issue 99, July 2001, news: the European launch on 22 June 2001 and the £30m campaign.
- Edge issue 102, October 2001, pp. 48-52, “Inside… Crawfish”: Cameron Sheppard and Martin Merren on C, assembler and the Z80; cartridge pricing; Wings, the Bitmap Brothers and Speedball II.
- Edge issue 104, December 2001: opening-day and European sales; criticism of the screen and software prices.
- Edge issue 120, February 2003, news: the Game Boy Advance SP.
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, E3 report: the Game Boy Micro.
- Hyper (Australia) issue 136, February 2005: GBA games on the Nintendo DS.
- Nintendo Power Advance issue 1, 2001: colours, sprites, resolution, battery life and the reflective screen.
- Martin Korth, GBATEK (web, secondary): processor, clock, memory, video modes, sprites and sound channels. https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm
- Nintendo Co., Ltd., “Consolidated Sales Transition by Region” (IR historical data, as of 31 March 2026): hardware and software units by region, and SP units. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/historical_data/index.html
- Wikipedia, “Game Boy Micro” (web, secondary): release date and compatibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Micro
- Wikipedia, “Nintendo Switch Online” (web, secondary): Game Boy Advance games added in February 2023.