[HN Gopher] An Ode to the Game Boy Advance
___________________________________________________________________
An Ode to the Game Boy Advance
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-03-30 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brainbaking.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (brainbaking.com)
| gxd wrote:
| One clear trend in mobile devices since the GBA times is the
| increase in screen sizes. The Switch's screen is just so much
| bigger than the GBA's. You also see that on phones, with popular
| models approaching if not exceeding 7" which used to be reserved
| to small tablets. Where do we stop? Don't get me wrong, I like
| the bigger screens, but portability is suffering and most pockets
| no longer fit today's "portable" devices.
| dagmx wrote:
| While screen sizes have increased since the game boy era,
| device sizes have not if you're comparing to phones which are
| the true successor to that kind of casual gaming.
|
| The average mobile phone is smaller than most generations of
| game boy.
|
| Additionally, unless you're purposefully buying phablets or
| only used the mini/micro/sp, device sizes on phones hasn't been
| increasing significantly over the last decade. In most cases,
| it's the bezels getting smaller and screen sizes growing to be
| a larger part of the same device size.
|
| Here are a smattering of measurements in millimetres. By
| volume, modern phones are way smaller. The biggest change is
| they're longer in one dimension, but still very comparable. .
|
| Original Gameboy 148mm (height) x 90mm (width) x 32mm (depth)
|
| Gameboy advance 81mm x 140mm x23mm
|
| Pixel 9 152.8 x 72 x 8.5 mm
|
| Gameboy mini 101.5 x 52.5 x 15.5 mm
|
| Gameboy advance SP 82x23x84
|
| Gameboy Micro 101 x 50 x 17.2
|
| iPhone 16 147.6 x 71.6 x 7.8 mm
|
| Taking the pixel vs the advance for volume, the Pixel is only
| 35% of the GBA, or if you take by area, ignoring depth, Pixel
| is 96% of the size of the GBA.
|
| If your pockets could fit a GBA, they certainly can fit a
| standard mobile phone.
| cubefox wrote:
| Interesting comparison. Though I believe he was comparing GBA
| to Switch, not GBA to phones. Phones just exhibit a similar
| trend (older phones were smaller than current ones).
| gxd wrote:
| Correct. Phones are getting bigger (but thinner) compared
| to older _phones_ while portable consoles are getting
| bigger compared to older _consoles_.
| dagmx wrote:
| That's only true if you consider all portable consoles in
| the same category.
|
| There's always been a market for the large portable
| console, also with the promise of docking. It's just that
| compute was difficult to achieve until recently, and the
| market for the small end has been eaten by phones, and so
| they only make the larger end now.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_handheld_game_c
| onsoles...
| dagmx wrote:
| Well, they compared both.
|
| But realistically, there's always been three categories to
| personal compute and gaming.
|
| For lack of better words, mobile, portable and home use.
|
| Mobile was the gameboy and now the mobile phone.
|
| Portable back then was the game gear and sega nomad. Today
| it's the switch, steamdeck, and for a while the PSP and PS
| Vita. These provide cut down versions of home console games
| or better fidelity than truly mobile.
|
| Home use being permanently plugged in like the SNES/N64.
|
| It's not that the small handhelds have gotten bigger, it's
| just that they've stopped making stuff in that smallest
| category.
|
| The fact is that mobile phones have taken over that mobile
| market completely. There's no space to compete so that
| market is dead for game console makers.
|
| This has been the trajectory for decades now.
| ppseafield wrote:
| There is a niche for small, mobile handhelds, with
| companies such as Retroid and Ambernic making devices
| with smaller screens. Interestingly even in this niche
| the proportion of truly mobile vs. portable is seeing the
| same continuing shift to larger, more powerful handhelds
| over time.
|
| It seems in all categories people tend to purchase
| devices with larger screens. I wonder if this is caused
| by the nowadays much larger proportion of adults using
| these devices, where the Gameboy, etc., we're seen more
| as children's toys - meaning smaller form factors and
| screens might have been a better fit.
| sylens wrote:
| I think the assumption is that everyone is carrying a bag now
| anyway. When the GBA came out, most people were still not
| carrying mobile phones so you had a pocket free besides wallet
| and keys
| dagmx wrote:
| Idk where you live, but bags are not any more common in my
| experience than in the 90s.
|
| The more likely reality is that gamers have different
| expectations today.
|
| The kinds of games you'd play on everything prior to the 3DS
| are things you'd play on mobile phones now.
|
| That leaves the middle area of more high fidelity games, with
| better ergonomics and closer to home consoles. That's what
| the Switch , the PSP and Vita and 3DS occupy.
|
| They can't compete anymore in the absolute mobile end of
| gaming space , so moved into the space in between. That
| requires larger devices to provide the experience gamers want
| that they can't get on the average phone till recently.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The untold story is that most modern portable gaming happens
| at home.
| __loam wrote:
| The screens had to get bigger to accommodate the unification of
| all platforms. It's great for game devs that you can ship
| something and port it to every platform with almost no effort.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| When I was a kid there was a market for 9 inch TVs.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| The max size I want a gaming device is probably that of the 3DS
| XL. Anything bigger than that definitely won't fit in my
| pocket. So screen size, what I really want is as big a screen
| as you can fit on a device that size without making it
| uncomfortable.
| bitwize wrote:
| The Switch is a different class of device than the GBA or DS: a
| hybrid console, intended for use on the go or as a home console
| almost equally well.
|
| Part of the problem is that the people who grew up with Game
| Boy type devices have shitty eyes now, and squinting at a
| little 2" screen is getting uncomfortable.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I played so much Advance Wars in high school that I would see the
| map whenever I closed my eyes and saw it in all my dreams.
|
| The original GBA is the most comfortable handheld I've played.
| Fit perfectly in my hands and my pocket.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Wow, haven't thought about that in years... Such a great game.
|
| Does anyone have any recommendations for a modern variant for
| pc/web?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| My wife asked the same question when I was restoring the GBA
| I found in the closet, so I set up an emulator with the ROM
| on her phone. Less storage space than most apps and doesn't
| need ads or tracking.
| RedNifre wrote:
| There's a not-modern variant for pc/web at
| https://awbw.amarriner.com/ and a modern not-pc/not-web
| variant for the Nintendo Switch.
| loupol wrote:
| You should probably check out Wargroove on Steam. It's very
| close to the Advance Wars games in terms in terms of
| mechanics.
| sylens wrote:
| They remade them for Switch. Some people claim Wargroove is a
| spiritual successor but I didn't like it nearly as much
| whateveracct wrote:
| Lost Frontier on mobile is good. Better than Wargroove imo.
| It really feels like the original Advance Wars in its
| simplicity. Just in a Western cowboy setting.
| celsius1414 wrote:
| I've had Warside wishlisted on Steam for a year now, as it
| looks to be just that. And when I looked it up just now to
| double-check the name, looks like it's coming out next month!
| Fingers crossed.
| silverquiet wrote:
| There are little hand-held emulation systems made in China
| these days that hobbyists enjoy developing for and playing
| with. Anbernic makes a model with the physical design of the
| GBA[0] and others make ones similar to the SP. They are neat
| little toys.
|
| [0]https://anbernic.com/products/rg34xx
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Thanks for the link. I've heard of Anbernic, but didn't know
| they had one that's the same design as the GBA
| everdrive wrote:
| Watching Mangs comment Advance Wars by Web (AWBW) games as I
| fall asleep is my guilty pleasure.
| https://www.youtube.com/@Mangs1337
| Dwedit wrote:
| What do you mean "No more HDMA tricks"? GBA literally does DMA
| transfers that are automatically carried out at the horizontal-
| blanking interval. It's just encoded differently than how the
| SNES did it - no scanline numbers, just raw data to transfer
| every scanline as the horizontal-blanking period happens.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Memory map is wrong, VRAM is its own 96KB, and does not
| incoroporate the palettes or OAM.
| Dwedit wrote:
| "Twice the speed of the GBC" is a bit misleading.
|
| Clock rate of the ARM7TDMI is indeed around double the GBC (GBA
| runs at 16.78Mz, while GBC runs at 8.4MHz), but cycles-per-
| instruction is far lower on the GBA's ARM7TDMI than the GBC's
| Z80-like processor.
|
| On GBA, most instructions take 1 cycle to execute (when running
| from fast memory). Not all instructions take one cycle, memory
| Read/Write instructions, branches, and multiplying takes more
| than one cycle.
|
| On GBC, an instruction basically takes 4 cycles per memory
| access. This includes the instruction fetch itself, each other
| byte of the instruction, each memory read/write performed, then 4
| additional cycles if the instruction performed 16-bit math. (Also
| stuff for branches too)
|
| But GBA doesn't always run code from fast memory. It gets the
| worst-case performance when executing code directly from the
| cartridge. When running 16-bit THUMB code, it takes 5 cycles.
| When running 32-bit ARM code, it takes 8 cycles. This means that
| a game needs to copy code into fast memory if it wants to run at
| a high performance.
|
| So with the full penalties that come from directly executing code
| from the cartridge, and you're comparing the simplest
| instructions, it does end up being only twice as fast. But when
| running code from fast memory, it's around 16 times faster.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-30 23:01 UTC)