A technical question about old handhelds.

Okay, so we all know about those old handhelds with "Color" in their name, e.g. the Game Boy Color, the Neo Geo Pocket Color, and the Wonder Swan Color. These all had monochrome counterparts, whose names were the same except minus the word "Color".

Now, what I find fascinating is that not only could the Color systems play games made for their monochrome predecessors, but in a lot of cases games made for the "Color" handhelds could be played on their monochrome counterparts.

What I want to know is, how was this possible? I mean, I know the "Color" handhelds were very similar to their monochrome counterparts, but I still think it would have taken some jiggering to make games work across systems.

edited 6th Jul '14 7:16:48 PM by MysteryMan23

I would imagine the internals are very similar. I mean, look at the 3DS - it still has parts from the GBA in it.

So I'd presume that the games that could play on the older counterparts didn't strictly need whatever power boost the Color versions gave them, and that's how they were coded to work.

edited 6th Jul '14 6:22:45 PM by burnpsy

I can understand that. (Heck, in all three cases the boosts were meager at best, from what I can tell.) What I don't get is how the cross-gen games manage to give the older systems meaningful color data instead of nonsense. I mean, the color handhelds would doubtless have very different graphics hardware from their monochrome counterparts. And while doubtless it wouldn't be too hard to design the color handheld's hardware to be able to handle monochrome signals, there's no way the monochrome systems' hardware was designed to receive color signals. So, it has to be something in the cartridge sending out monochrome signals instead of color signals. Maybe the games were programmed to recognize which system they were on? I don't know.

For what it's worth, there's at least two Gameboy Color games that unlock extra content when played on the Gameboy Advance, so it's definitely possible to program a cartridge to recognize the console it's being played on.

Yes, by then there must have been enough room on the cartridges to squeeze in a whole extra set of palettes. Remember there was also the Super Game Boy, which had many games with extra features like colors, borders, and higher-quality sound effects only when played on it. During the transition to Game Boy Color, some games that still worked on the original Game Boy and already had color palettes on the Super Game Boy were given new color palettes for play on the Game Boy Color, so I guess that would be three sets of palette information packed onto one game cartridge.

Palette information actually doesn't take up that much room, at least for sprite based games. The limitation was how many colors could be shown on screen at the same time. And it's rare that a game uses up all the available space. There are some, but they tended to be RP Gs until recently.

Yeah, the only older games off the top of my head that managed to use up all of the space on a cartridge are the original Pokemon games (Mew just barely fit after removing the debug tools).

edited 7th Jul '14 7:03:51 PM by burnpsy

I did a quick search about those, and someone said it was only the Japanese Red, Green, and Blue versions of Pocket Monsters that were 512 kilobytes. The Yellow and international versions were doubled to 1 megabyte, giving them breathing room to make more modifications. Then Gold, Silver, and Crystal were doubled again to 2 megabytes. Since I heard they already had to do some compression to get Gold and Silver to fit everything, I guess one of the reasons Crystal no longer runs on the original Game Boy is so that the new features could replace the redundant information for old systems.

Another thing I learned from searching is that the "GB Tower" feature of Pokemon Stadium is a full Super Game Boy emulator that can run non-Pokemon games to some extent if their headers are hacked to say they are Pokemon. It even loads the borders!

Are you saying that a home console was emulating a handheld console before in-home PC's were doing it? That's amazing.

Okay, and I found one more video about it. Sounds like it actually does the "Load a Super Game Boy border, then play in Game Boy Color mode" thing, and some parts are glitchy because they didn't implement everything, and the save data is expected to fit Pokemon, so you probably can never save.

From the same channel, a ZX Spectrum emulator in Goldeneye 007!

Wow. Shame on you Zoinkitty. Shame. On. You. I don't care if it is April Fool's Day, there is never a good reason to have screen glare in your videos.

Christine Love's take on the Super Game Boy, if it interests you. Wish she didn't bag on it so much, although it was ill used like she says.

edited 8th Jul '14 12:07:57 AM by Schitzo

Yeah, well, uh, maybe Dark Matter was hearkening back to the last level of Kirby's Adventure, which was black-and-white to look like Kirby's Dream Land 1! Because sometimes the biggest shock is Nothing Is Scarier