Game Boy Advance

Despite the addition of colours, the jump from the original Game Boy to the Game Boy Color was not quite large enough. Developers were not given any new powers to play with, and many began to connect the Game Boy with outdated technology and called it a primitive piece of engineering. Not to loose the only market where Nintendo was still the leading force, Nintendo launched the Game Boy Advance in 2001.

This new piece of hardware proved to be a large jump for the Game Boy series, with power and capabilities close resembling the Super Nintendo. The Game Boy Advance was born as a 2d machine, as a large number of functions and effectes dedicated to rendering sprites and 3d-backgrounds are built into the graphics chip. 96 kilobytes of RAM are accessible, making the console able run the 240x160 pixels LCD screen in 32,000 colours. Centrally the console is equipped with a 16,8 MHz 32-bit ARM7 main processor and an additional 288 kilobytes of RAM. As its predecessor, multiple Game Boy Advances can be linked up, and it is even possible to connect it with the GameCube.

As the architecture resembles the Super Nintendo as much as it does, the Game Boy Advance features many upgrades and direct conversions of old SNES classics.

The Super Mario Advance series, Mario Kart: Super Circuit, Magical Quest and Sword Of Mana are some of the better examples of this. However, the Game Boy Advance also features new material, where especially the series Castlevania, Golden Sun, Metroid and Advance Wars lights up.