An Ode to the Game Boy Advance
40 comments
·March 30, 2025Dwedit
ant6n
The default setup on startup is 4 cycles for ROM access as you mention, but with system control registers you can control how fast the memory is - apparently current ROM has 3/1 wait states (first/sequential) access for 16 Bit access. There’s also a prefetch queue instructions. I understand this means when running THUMB code from ROM, non-branching instructions can also run at full speed.
gxd
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
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 × 71.6 × 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.
null
cubefox
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
Correct. Phones are getting bigger (but thinner) compared to older phones while portable consoles are getting bigger compared to older consoles.
dagmx
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.
VyseofArcadia
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.
musicale
Nintendo handhelds from GB to New 3DS XL were mostly very pocketable (except for 2DS.) I am still a fan of the 3DS XL form factor, and the dual screen clamshell design. DS and GBA SP also had great clamshell form factors. 3DS was also fun to carry around for streetpasses.
But I really like the Switch in handheld mode, and I actually want a bigger screen since for me it's more of a baggable rather than a pocketable, and many games have tiny text or UI elements sized for docked/TV mode rather than handheld mode.
VyseofArcadia
I don't mind the existence of baggable handhelds. I own both a Switch and a Steam Deck, and the Steam Deck won't even fit in the oversized pockets of cargo shorts. But I wish there were room in the market for both baggables and pocketables[0]. I'd 100% buy a scaled-down Steam Deck that is roughly 3DS XL-sized.[1]
[0] For a while Nintendo was claiming that the Switch wasn't their new portable console, it was just a console that happened to be portable. There would still be a successor to the 3DS at some point. I guess you could argue that's the Switch Lite, but I still feel a little betrayed to not get a smaller next-gen handheld.
[1] I'm aware there's a flourishing market of mostly Chinese arm64 devices running Android and loaded with emulators for every system you could imagine. But I want an x86 device to play my existing GoG and Steam games.
sylens
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
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
The untold story is that most modern portable gaming happens at home.
musicale
I see lots of people playing smartphone and tablet games, usually at max volume, on public transit, in stores, at dining locations, and in many other public spaces. Mostly anti-social gaming and/or child sedation, though I saw multiple players playing the same online game once.
But I think you are on to something, and not just that kids (or adults) don't go outside or interact with friends as much as they did in the past. It's just very enjoyable and comfortable to curl up with a portable game system at home, much as one could with a good book (if we still read books.)
bitwize
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.
musicale
Switch probably doesn't help since many games size their text and UI for docked mode and display on a large TV screen.
__loam
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.
Dwedit
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.
zoklet-enjoyer
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.
silverquiet
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.
zoklet-enjoyer
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
Watching Mangs comment Advance Wars by Web (AWBW) games as I fall asleep is my guilty pleasure. https://www.youtube.com/@Mangs1337
digdugdirk
Wow, haven't thought about that in years... Such a great game.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a modern variant for pc/web?
loupol
You should probably check out Wargroove on Steam. It's very close to the Advance Wars games in terms in terms of mechanics.
sylens
They remade them for Switch. Some people claim Wargroove is a spiritual successor but I didn’t like it nearly as much
RedNifre
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.
AlotOfReading
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.
whateveracct
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
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.
Dwedit
Memory map is wrong, VRAM is its own 96KB, and does not incoroporate the palettes or OAM.
"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.