How Graphics worked on the Nintendo Game Boy Color | MVG
Modern Vintage Gamer
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In 1998 Nintendo released the Game Boy Color, an upgrade to the original DMG Game Boy. The Game Boy Color (GBC) was fully backward compatible with the Game Boy but came with some improvements to the original architecture. In this episode we take a look at the Graphics subsystem of the GBC and discover some of the technical achievements developers were able to pull off.
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#Nintendo #GBC #Graphics
10.12.2021
I've seen this episode before but now I'm rewatching it after watching your latest video, How Cartridges worked on the Nintendo Gameboy. I sometimes binge watch your videos even if I've already seen them before. You pack a lot of information in a short time which means I sometimes learn something new the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th time around.
4:40 That music playing, what game is it??? I've been trying to find that game forever!
GBC is what the original GB should've been, TBH.
Nintendo did not make the GBC because they did not want a new handheld with a new architecture. They wanted to make a new handheld using as little R&D as possible to maximize profits. It worked well, but even when I had a gameboy color in 1999/2000ish I knew the graphics seemed a lot more primative then they should have been for the time. I Knew the snes came out in 1990/1991 and the gameboy color stilll did not have graphics equal to the SNES?
When I played Zelda Oracle of Ages as a kid, I was impressed by the cutscene at the start, but was turned off by the in game graphics. Today I feel most of the gameboy color and earlier games did not age well at all.
I loved the GBC. Great video.
metal beat
Game boy color is still thrvmost comfortable handheld I have used
4:22 what game is this i forgot the name
Ilikthevedoiyoustohave
Iprupligamboy illicit
Ilikthegamplayhonit🤓🕹
8:14 Nice T-spin.
Great video! I'd love to hear your thoughts on the short-lived Neo Geo Pocket.
What's the intro's song??
You didn't mention with button combos you could use different palettes on the GBC.
price per gameboy was pretty rich for a kid to afford, however, most kids had other stuff in their lives too. 150 aud aussie dollar was the price for mine with one or two games, but damn, i must have put in 150 or so hours before i sold it at least. i am not a gamer, but i did play pokemon yellow and silver a few times through, its worth it, however when new systems come out keep in mind kids savings, it is becoming more difficult with the internet to save for things especially for kids these days, with more and more things distracting them.
Can we all admit that we barely understand this stuff?
Well that's interesting. I wrote Gameboy Road Rash and I thought I was being clever changing the yscroll as well as xscroll each scanline. Looks like everyone was doing it 😂😂
What a brilliant video!
Gameboy pocket was also compatible, is it too same to count as a different thing at all?
It's nice to know how this stuff works, I've been growing my console and game collection and I find it interesting to know how each component works. I'll be it though, it's completely useless information, but interesting nonetheless.
Any chance your could do a similar analysis of the Game Gear hardware?
1:02 that chin tho
What about the screen tho? I noticed how much sharper the Gameboy color is compared to the original. The original has a hazy/blurry fuzziness about it. The color is crystal sharp. Obviously we know it's the same resolution, so what's going on here?
Awesome…thanks
Any chance we can get the turbo express handhelds graphics explained
Your videos about graphic tech are so interesting! Can you recomend sources (books, webs, other) to learn more about this? ( I mean other than your videos because I've already seen it haha).
Detailled history of graphics, render types 2D/3D, detailled architecture of graphics chip…
The GBC is what the GB should have been for me to ever buy an handheld 😉
After having suffered from using a b/w CRT on my C64 years ago, I declared to never use anything without color, when I finally had my 1084s. The later released Gameboy was just unbearable, and I never understood, why a grayscale handheld could become such an success. And when the better handhelds (GBC and GBA, while Lynx and Gamegear never counted as they where too energy hungry and too huge) arrived, I generally wasn't interested in having one anymore. Well. up to now. Maybe I am gonna buy some emulation handheld device for retro purposes.
Trying to play one without a backlight these days is pretty tough
The "Prehistorik Man"-Intro-Screen always makes me wondering… Such cool Parallax- and Line-Scrolling!
4:46, music is from what game, I forget?!
I really like the memory/RAM visualization
Reee
Actually Another World is using same 16 color mode on both EGA and VGA on PC. The only difference is that EGA had fixed palette like ZX Spectrum or C64, while VGA had 18-bit (262 thousands) color DAC which could assign any color to each palette entry in all color modes: 2, 4, 16 or 256 colors. Another World in general runs in 16 colors on other systems like Amiga and Atari ST.
"underpaawered" Dude, I love your accent <3
Fascinating video !!
Amazing vídeo! Great work.
The only channel i can hit like on before i watch
Does anybody else think that the GBC was basically an 8 bit handheld with a 16 bit color palette? Or maybe just an underpowered 16 bit game boy? It’s quite an interesting discussion
Nintendo wasnt known for its advanced tech. They were known cheaply mass producing underpowered tech and trying to max out its performance.
XEKKUSU is not really that challenging to do on a Z80. Vector rotation, translation and scaling (especially in integers) isn't really that hard. It's generally matrix multiplication, multiplication although not a feature on the Z80 is easy to implement. The rotation is tricky if you want to implement sin and cosine (without maths coprocessor), but you can pre calculate the sin and cos tables and use those and you can even have those in integer values avoiding all floating point calculations — and the reduced resolution makes it easy.
Elite on a 1MHz 6502, BBC Acorn already did it, which is arguably even harder because it doesn't have a combined 16 bit registers. The tricky part is the fact that the GameBoy didn't have a bitmap mode. So you need to basically have a table that describes which tile is on an X, Y location, and then create a point in that tile. This is probably the biggest hack but it was done in the C64 for years,
if Nintendo just could do something similar with the switch by simply adding moar RAM bandwidth AND DLSS support…but NOPE!!!!
06:09 what game is this please? Gradius?
thank you
I grow up wanting this item,got it until i was 30….still enjoy it …
Who care about the resolution when u cant even see your screen in mid dark.
Whoa hang on. Sorry, I know this is probably a total dumbass question but I’m gonna have to ask it because I’m confused. How do you get 32,768 colors from a 15 bit color palette?
I have a fairly rudimentary understanding of bits, and as far as I’m aware one bit has two states, being either a 1 or a 0. So when MVG said the original GameBoy only had 4 colors from a 2 bit color palette, that made sense because I just assumed that was 2 squared equaling 4. But if I use the same math with a 15 bit palette in mind, 15 squared equals 225 not 32,768.
I fear I might have Donkey Brain. What am I missing here? Thanks in advance
Hehe, Ill never forget that Cannon Fodder intro, absolutely brilliant.
2:40 what is this game?
what is the intro song's name ?
A great, but obscure, GBC game is Keitai Denjuu Telefang. It has an English translation patch now.
Really really nice video!
Learned lots of things a usual
And the background music! Around 2'50 is metal masters… What a good sound
But what is th name of the first ost in the video? Seems great too!