Game Boy Color – Flickroom

The Game Boy Color [ a ] ( normally abbreviated as GBC ) is a hand-held game console, manufactured by Nintendo, which was released in Japan on October 21, 1998 [ 5 ] and to international markets that November. It is the successor to the Game Boy and is function of the Game Boy family. [ 4 ]

The GBC features a color screen quite than monochrome, but it is not backlit. It is slightly thicker and tall and features a slenderly smaller screen than the Game Boy Pocket, its immediate predecessor in the Game Boy line. As with the original Game Boy, it has a custom 8-bit central processing unit made by Sharp that is considered a hybrid between the Intel 8080 and the Zilog Z80. [ 6 ] The american English spell of the system ‘s name, Game Boy Color, remains consistent throughout the populace. The Game Boy Color is separate of the one-fifth generation of video game consoles. The GBC ‘s primary competitors in Japan were the grayscale 16-bit handhelds, SNK ‘s Neo Geo Pocket and Bandai ‘s WonderSwan, though the Game Boy Color outsold them by a wide margin. SNK and Bandai countered with the Neo Geo Pocket Color and the WonderSwan Color, respectively, but this did little to change Nintendo ‘s sales authority. With Sega discontinuing the Game Gear in 1997, the Game Boy Color ‘s lone rival in the United States was its harbinger, the Game Boy, until the ephemeral Neo Geo Pocket Color was released in North America in August 1999. The Game Boy and the Game Boy Color combined have sold 118.69 million units worldwide making them the third- best-selling organization of all time. [ 8 ] On March 23, 2003, the Game Boy Color was discontinued, curtly after the release of the Game Boy Advance SP. Its best-selling plot is Pokémon Gold and Silver, which shipped 23 million units cosmopolitan. [ 9 ] [ 10 ]

history

Development for the Game Boy Color began in 1996, when Nintendo received requests from game developers for a more sophisticate hand-held platform, who said that even the latest iteration of the original system, the Game Boy Pocket, had insufficient hardware. [ citation needed ] [ 11 ] Nintendo developed the console concurrently with its successor, the Game Boy Advance ( which was codenamed “ Atlantis ” at the time ). The vector sum product was backward compatible with all existing Game Boy software, a first for a hand-held system, allowing each raw Game Boy class launch to begin with a importantly larger game library than any of its competitors. On March 23, 2003, the Game Boy Color was discontinued .

hardware

technical specifications

The technical specifications for the console are as follows : [ 12 ]
Game Paks manufactured by Nintendo have the following specifications :

• ROM: 8 MB maximum
• Cartridge RAM: 128 kiB maximum

Without extra plotter hardware, the utmost ROM size is 32kiB/256kib .
The Game Boy Color motherboard The processor, which is a Zilog Z80 workalike made by Sharp with a few extra ( bit manipulation ) instructions, has a clock accelerate of approximately 8 MHz, doubly equally fast as that of the original Game Boy. The Game Boy Color has three times deoxyadenosine monophosphate much memory as the original ( 32 kilobytes organization RAM, 16 kilobytes television RAM ). The shield resolution is the same as the original Game Boy at 160×144 pixels. The Game Boy Color features an infrared communications port for wireless linking. The feature is merely supported in a minor number of games, so the infrared port was dropped from the Game Boy Advance line, to be late reintroduced with the Nintendo 3DS, though radio linking would return in the Nintendo DS pipeline using Wi-Fi. The console is able of displaying up to 56 unlike colors simultaneously on screen door from its palette of 32,768 ( 8×4 color background palettes, 8×3+transparent fairy palettes ), and can add basic four-, seven- or ten-color shade to games that had been developed for the original 4-shades-of-grey Game Boy. In the 7-color modes, the sprites and backgrounds are given freestanding tinge schemes, and in the 10-color modes the sprites are far separate into two differently-colored groups ; however, as flat black ( or white ) was a shared fourth color in all but one ( 7-color ) pallette, the overall effect is that of 4, 6, or 8 colors. This method of upgrading the color count results in graphic artifacts in certain games ; for case, a fairy that is supposed to meld into the background is sometimes color individually, making it well detectable. handling of pallette registers during display allows for a rarely used eminent color modality, capable of displaying more than 2,000 colors on the screen door simultaneously. [ 15 ]

color palettes

color palettes used for Game Boy games

For dozens of blue-ribbon Game Boy games, the Game Boy Color has an enhanced palette built-in featuring up to 16 colors—four colors for each of the Game Boy ‘s four layers. [ 16 ] If the arrangement does not have a palette stored for a game, it defaults to a palette of green, blue, salmon, black, and flannel. however, at power-up, one of 12 built-in color palettes is selectable by pressing a directional clitoris and optionally A or B while the Game Boy logo is present on the screen. These palettes each incorporate improving to ten colors. [ 17 ] In most games, the four shades displayed on the original Game Boy translate to different subsets of this 10-color palette, such as by displaying movable sprites in one subset and backgrounds in another. The grayscale ( Left + B ) palette produces an appearance similar to that experienced on the original Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, or Game Boy Light .
Illustrated color-samples of the palettes for the different key combinations. Any coloring material crossed out will be present in palette RAM, but rendered as diaphanous .

partial tilt of games with particular palettes

Hi-Color Mode

A few games used a scan-line coloring material switch technique to increase the number of colors available on-screen to more than 2,000. This “ Hi-Color mode ” was used by license developers including 7th Sense. Some examples of games using this proficiency are The Fish Files, The New Addams Family Series, and Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. [ 15 ] Cannon Fodder uses this technique to render full motion television segments in the insertion sequence, ending, and main menu screen door. [ 18 ]

Cartridges

The clear cartridge for exclusive Game Boy Color games . The black cartridge is for Game Boy games that takes advantage of the Game Boy Color ‘s increased pallette, but not the increase memory or processor speed. These games can be played on the original Game Boy in grayscale. Game Boy Color exclusive games are housed in clear-colored Game Pak cartridges. [ 19 ] They are shaped differently than master Game Boy Game Paks. notably, these cartridges lack a notch that prevented the original Game Paks from being removed while the original Game Boy was powered on due to a fictile piece attached to the power trade, which would slide over the notch, locking a cartridge inside the system during gameplay ( although some special cartridges like Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble [ 20 ] do include this notch ). The lack of this notch keeps original Game Boy systems loaded with Game Boy Color cartridges from powering on. similarly, Game Boy Pocket, Super Game Boy, Super Game Boy 2, and Game Boy Light will ability on when loaded with a Game Boy Color cartridge but will refuse to load the game and will display a warn message stating that a Game Boy Color system is required. This lapp warn message can be viewed on an original Game Boy vitamin a well if the piece that slides into the notch is cut out of the Game Boy. Some Game Boy cartridges such as Chee-Chai Alien [ 21 ] [ 22 ] and Pocket Music [ 23 ] can not be played on Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP systems. When insert and powered on, these systems will exhibit a alike error message and will not load the game .

exemplar colors

The logo for Game Boy Color spells out the discussion “ COLOR ” in the five original colors in which the whole was manufactured : Berry ( C ), Grape ( O ), Kiwi ( L ), Dandelion ( O ), and Teal ( R ). Another color released at the lapp fourth dimension was “ nuclear purple ”, made of a translucent purple fictile similar to the tinge available for the Nintendo 64 accountant. other colors were sold as specify editions or in specific countries .

Games

due to its backward compatibility with Game Boy games, the Game Boy Color ‘s establish period had a large playable library. The system amassed a library of 576 Game Boy Color games over a four-year period. While the majority of the games are Game Boy Color exclusive, approximately 30 % of the games released are compatible with the original Game Boy. Tetris for the original Game Boy is the best-selling game compatible with Game Boy Color, and Pokémon Gold and Silver are the best-selling games developed chiefly for it. The best-selling Game Boy Color exclusive game is Pokémon Crystal. The concluding Game Boy Color bet on ever released is the japanese exclusive Doraemon no Study Boy: Kanji Yomikaki Master, on July 18, 2003. The survive game released in North America is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, released on November 15, 2002. In Europe the last game released for the system is Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite!, on January 10, 2003 .

launch games

Sales

The Game Boy and Game Boy Color were both commercially successful, selling a combined 32.47 million units in Japan, 44.06 million in the Americas, and 42.16 million in other regions. [ 8 ] In 2003, when the Game Boy Color was discontinued, the couple was the best-selling game comfort of all prison term. Both the Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2 have since outsold the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and frankincense the pair are immediately the third-best-selling console and the second-best-selling hand-held of all time .

See besides

Notes

1. ^Japanese: ゲームボーイカラー, Hepburn: Gēmubōi Karā

References