Game Boy: Difference between revisions

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[[File:175px-Gameboy.jpg|frame|The green screen of life.]]

 

{{quote|''And the night got deathly quiet

 

Until the late 1980s, handheld gaming was very limited, both in processing power and the capabilities of small monitors. Gaming until then was achieved by having an [[LCD]] screen that had all possible graphical elements built into the screen, and gameplay would be achieved by controlling which elements were visible to simulate graphics. A video game form of [[Limited Animation]]. This had been going on successfully for years with [[Tiger Electronics]]' handheld games and Nintendo's own [[Game and Watch|Game & Watch series]].

[[Memetic Mutation]] holds that the original Game Boy design is [[Made of Indestructium|the toughest object in existence]] after a working Game Boy was retrieved from a barracks that had been [http://farm1.static.flickr.com/33/45214051_48ee39c14f.jpg bombed during] the 1990-1991 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBeTXPaewMo Gulf War].

 

* One of the ways it saves power and cost is to integrate the data, graphics, and sound processing into the [[CPU]]. It is a Sharp LR35902 clocked at 4.19 MHz, similar to the Z80 (a few instructions of the CPU were left out as they used more battery power than they added to processing power, however, there were added back in for the [[Game Boy Color]]).

 

* 8 KB main RAM and 8 KB [[Video RAM]].

* Carts could be 32 KB to 4 MB.

** Nintendo integrated popular features from the "MMC" support chips on NES Game Paks (scanline counters, status bars and extra RAM) into the Game Boy chipset. Game Boy Game Paks used much simpler "MBC" support chips to do bank switching and possibly battery save. This apparently contributed to the low price of the games, which were about half of NES games.

 

* Up to 40 sprites on screen at once. Size is the same as the NES (8x8 or 8x16 pixels), but it is far less likely to flicker if there are too many sprites on screen. Game Boy sprites can cover up to half a scanline, while NES sprites can cover only a quarter.

* Note that there are two sprite palettes for sprites - the only difference is the middle shade of gray. It's either the lighter or the darker shade - white and black remain as is.

 

* Four colors. Just that many. It could still have a lot of detail in the right hands.

** The selling point of the Super Game Boy, a peripheral for the [[Super Nintendo Entertainment System]] that allowed you to play Game Boy games on your television, is to customize those four colors into a color palette of your choice or creation, saved via password. GB games created with Super Game Boy features have special palettes that frequently change mid-game, and sometimes divide the screen into areas that get their own sets of four colors.

* Resolution is 160×144.

 

* Uses 4 AA batteries.

** The Pocket uses 2 AAA batteries.

* Maximum life is reported between 30 and 40 hours.

 

* ''[[Adventure Island]]''

** ''Adventure Island II''