Well, Whenever I think of the GBA, I immediately think of 2 things: absolutely amazing BG and sprite capabilities, and atrocious resolution. I've had observations that the resolution of a certain system I know (that still needs a certain program so I can do something...) is twice of that of the GBA (320x240 vs. 240 x160). I've heard that name table fetches on the SNES take 2 bits per pixel and (assuming that it takes the same amount of time here) if you get 8 from 8bpp for each layer on the GBA and 2 and then multiply it by 4, you get 40. However, If the resolution was doubled, I imagine that the GBA would only be able to handle 2 8bpp BGs instead of 4. Is this correct? Just like I always hear people talk about the SNES having an extra 2bpp BG layer, but the display only being 256 pixels wide. If name table fetches on the Genesis take the same amount of time, I guess that the Genesis having 1.25x the resolution of the SNES would cancel out the SNES having 1.25x the amount of "bits per pixelage"?
The dot clock of the GBA PPU is 4.2 MHz, one-fourth of the 16.8 MHz master clock, with 240 picture dots and 68 hblank dots in each scanline. The Super NES PPU also has four master clocks per dot, with 256 picture dots and 84 hblank dots in each scanline. So that can't be all of it.
The S-PPU makes two memory accesses each dot. In the shipping hardware, this is done with two 8-bit memories, but it can also be done with one 8-bit memory operated at double data rate. I'm guessing the GBA PPU accesses memory a lot faster, possibly 16 bits wide at full master clock rate.
So really, it seems that the screen was small on the GBA due to the cost of the screen and nothing else?
Correct. At the time, 240x160 was a substantial upgrade from 160x144 of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color.
Talking about the GB and the GBA just reminds me of all the weirdoes who played GB games on "widescreen" on the GBA. One thing though: If they still had extra power left over, why didn't they use it?
Espozo wrote:
One thing though: If they still had extra power left over, why didn't they use it?
One reason was budget constraints. GBA games sold for $30-$35 each in the United States market, which was half of what (say) N64 games sold for, and I'm under the impression that publishers wanted to pump more money into blockbuster PlayStation 2 and GameCube games. Another was time constraints. Developers had about three and a half years to learn the GBA before the DS came out with full fixed-function 3D hardware, so there was not enough time for developer skill to improve the way it did from (say)
Donkey Kong to
Battletoads or from the Xbox 360 and PS3 launch titles to the ones that came out just before the Xbox One and PS4.