Nintendo GameBoy a valid discussion topic now?

From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre_at_floodgap.com>
Date: Thu May 20 10:18:33 2004

> > Nintendo seems to base their handhelds on their previous generation
> > handhelds. The original GameBoy was, mostly, a NES with a black-and-white
> > screen. The GBA is, mostly, a SNES.
>
> I dunno if I'd go this far, especially w/r/t the processor and video:
> obviously the video pipelines and coppers are radically different, and the
> NES is a 6502 variant (N2A03) versus the Z80 of the GB, and the SNES is a
> 65816. There are some conceptual similarities between the GB and the NES,
> and the GBA and the SNES, but I'm not sure if I'd call them architecturally
> similar as well.

... although I noticed what you said was previous generation "handhelds"
after I reread the message, and that *is* true; the GBC is a faster GB with
a custom colour video system, extra memory and a couple of other hardware
goodies, and the GBA basically takes the easy way out and carries a GBC
inside of it for backwards compatibility.

Compared to a GBC, though, the GBA is more revolution than evolution.
Besides the jump from Z80 to ARM, there's a nice video copper with some
neat layering tricks and hardware scaling/rotation.

-- 
---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
 Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser_at_floodgap.com
-- Neckties strangle clear thinking. -- Lin Yutang ----------------------------
Received on Thu May 20 2004 - 10:18:33 BST

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