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Game Boy Advance Development Kit Revealed
We've snagged top-secret pictures of the GBA hardware and Yoshi's Story running on it.
August 21, 2000
Three days to go. Nintendo will completely pull the covers off the company's next-generation handheld system to the public on August 24, 2000 in an invite-only event a day before its public Space World expo. At this event Nintendo will reveal the system in all its glory – the casing, the capabilities, and the connectivity to the company's next-generation console system (code name Dolphin). And we'll be there to give you the scoop.
But as an appropriate teaser, we headed off to some remote location in the South China sea to finally snap pictures of the Game Boy Advance development systems game designers have been working on as early as last April. What you see below is the actual Game Boy Advance hardware before it's been shrunk down to a more portable and manageable size in order to fit into a handheld casing. The system below is more or less what every licensed Game Boy Advance developer has in their possession. This is the real deal, people, and we thought you'd like to know what's going to be driving your handheld games for the next few years.
We revealed this hardware in a story printed a few months ago, but unless you're a third-party Game Boy Advance developer, this will be the first time you'll see it. Enjoy.
As you can see, the system's a little too big and square to be appropriately portable, but everything you see here (with the exception of the multi-pin parallel port on the left side) will be implemented on the final system that will be revealed in three days.
Most importantly, you get to see the Game Boy Advance LCD screen. It's clearly larger than the Game Boy Color screen and much wider, giving the games a more cinematic look. It's also obvious that the system will not have a backlight – if you take a look at the pictures of Yoshi below, you'll see how difficult it was to snap pictures of the image on-screen. Don't take this as the screen is difficult to see – with all the colors the Game Boy Advance is capable of, the image is a lot more vibrant and seemingly brighter. It's just hard for the camera to pick up the reflected light.
Of course, the system's going to have a speaker, volume controls, and a headphone jack just like the past Game Boy systems, but internally the sound hardware is lightyears above the existing handhelds. You'll definitely put the headphone jack to use to hear the digital audio music and effects in stereo and yes, Dolby Surround.
The system only has one cartridge slot – but this slot will allow you to plug Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges, as well as the Game Boy Advance carts into the system. This is a good indication that the Game Boy Advance games will be housed on nearly identical cartridge boards as the past Game Boy games…just larger capacity.
Most importantly are the controls. You can see the Super NES game controller hooked to the board so developers can play their games more comfortably, but the board also has the button configuration of the Game Boy Advance:
You can clearly (well, except for the labels on the right side) that the system is only going to have four action buttons. The buttons on the left are for the eight-way control pad (laid out in up, down, left, and right fashion…and pressing two buttons at the same time will supply the diagonal controls), and the middle set is for the Start and Select functionality. The four buttons on the right are labeled A, B, L, and R, indicating the system will have the standard two action buttons on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, as well as Left and Right shoulder buttons that'll be used for Game Boy Advance-exclusive games.
But what you really want to see are games running on the system – and we've come through with that, too. Supplied to every Game Boy Advance third-party developer is a one-level conversion of Yoshi's Story. This game's intention is to show how colorful the graphics on the game system can be, as well as to put its 2D sprite capabilities to test. The following pictures are snapped from the actual LCD screen – and not from any external source. The game will look much, much better when you play it in person, but we felt you'd like to see something in action on the screen as soon as possible. So here you go:
Click on the images to see a larger view of the game screen
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When the demo opens up, you get a slick demonstration of the Game Boy Advance's Mode 7 capabilities. The island itself is rendered in a full 360 rotation, but the sky and water are independent background planes that rotate with the island. This is an original screen for the GBA – it's not in the N64 version of the game.
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The game opens up on familiar terrain – this level is based on the same first level of the N64 version – only the characters and land paths have been changed. You get a great sense of the GBA's multi-plane scrolling, high framerate character animation and high color palette. And, of course, the Yoshi's Story theme song plays in the background.
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It's time to sniff around. When you hit the shoulder button, you can zoom the camera for a closer look at Yoshi, just like in the N64 version of the game. In the larger version of this picture, you can see that the Game Boy Advance doesn't have the filter effects of the N64, which means scaled objects tend to look a little blockier when they get bigger. But it's a minor issue – it just means the GBA can't anti-alias edges. Not a big deal for a system with a portable screen.
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As you progress deeper in this level, you'll encounter these massively huge Shy Guy characters. Obviously the programmers of this demo wanted to prove that you can easily break the Game Boy Color's usual 10-pixel sprite limitation on the GBA hardware. There's no slowdown to be found here.
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This was a very difficult picture to take, due to the dark nature of the image. But if you remember in Yoshi's Story on the N64, your character gets taken to a castle when he loses a life. This is a recreation of that scene on the Game Boy Advance. It's identical in every way.
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Nintendo still hasn't indicated whether or not Yoshi's Story is indeed a Game Boy Advance title or simply done for the benefit of developers working on the hardware. But keep this in mind: Super Mario Bros. DX for the Game Boy Color was a simple one-level demonstration shopped around before the system was released…and it became one of the GBC's top-selling games a few months later.
This is just a taste of things to come, since the final Game Boy Advance system will be finally shown later this week. Make sure you're on IGNpocket for that – our coverage begins late Wednesday night.
And if you want to see more of the Game Boy Advance, check out the first games announced for the system from Nintendo.
-- Craig Harris
These are the shots that we've been talking about for months. Now that they're out, can you see anything in these shots that interests you? Throw your opinins out in IGN's Pocket Boards.
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