GBA Internal Light Ready?

Dark Paladin writes "Looks like Portable Monopoly , the internal Gameboy Advance light, is finally ready to move beyond Vaporware and launch. The price for the kit? $35. Finally - me, a dark night, and my GBA. " Perhaps with this, we can revoke GBA's current title holder as "Worst Screen Ever". Still, Golden Sun is a great game.

Re:How soon before...

[Hnice]

No, no, you want real pain, and a smack in the face to all of us -- as well as this guy, of course, who's been doing this for months

How soon before Nintendo, who just dropped the gba price to $80, starts marketing a new model, with a light like this one, to re-sell to everyone who purchased one of the current crap-screen models, simultaneously revealing their plan to screw us, and rendering this great work a nice experiment but nothing more?

Who did the QA on the GBA?

[SplendidIsolatn]

I've only used the GBA a handful of times, and must admit the lighting is awful. All I want to know is who Nintendo had test this before it went to market. A pack of rhesus monkeys? Unlike the Gamecube, PS2, or X-Box, it isn't like there is huge competition for the handheld game market, and they already had a near perfect brand name to build on. Why did they rush out an otherwise fine product out with that one major flaw?

With this internal lighting now available, I might finally plunk down the $$$ for my own GBA.

Not the worst screen ever

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

If you think it's the worst screen ever, play the original game boy again. There, now do you remember how blurry it would get whenever the screen scrolls? Now put an original game boy or color game boy cartridge in your GBA. Amazingly visible!

It's not the screen that's the problem: it's only with certain games (Castlevania, Circle of the Moon being the biggest offender).

Re:How soon before...

[Eccles]

How soon before Nintendo, who just dropped the gba price to $80, starts marketing a new model, with a light like this one

Nintendo is brain-damaged when it comes to providing lights. They could have sold millions of Gameboy Colors with a built-in light for $50 more than the base GC, but never did. Likewise, they could have made a killing selling a deluxe unit with better speakers and a larger screen, but nope.

Also, the PM guys may be trying to patent their lighting system just to discourage Nintendo from taking their design and selling it themselves. (Although I doubt PM would discourage a nice profitable licensing arrangement.)

Re:FINALLY

[iapetus]

Is something bigger/better coming in the next few months?

No. And if it were, it probably wouldn't make much of a difference - GBA's predecessors have seen off superior technology in the past without blinking. If you think MS has a monopoly on the OS market, it's nothing compared to what Nintendo has in handheld gaming. :)

About the only thing that could make a dent in that would be Sony and/or MS entering the handheld market, and that isn't going to happen for a while, if at all.

Re:Not the worst screen ever

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

I said original game boy. The game boy color certainly isn't blurry. Pocket might not be either, never saw it--I'm talking about the huge one that needed 4 AAs.

In any event, if I put Game boy color games in my game boy advance, they look just as if it they were in my game boy color, except that I have the option of stretching it (with the L and R buttons)

So, the game boy advance screen is strictly better that the game boy color screen.

Just so you know...

[spacedx]

The GBA has a reflective LCD screen, hence the reason it needs a direct lighting source. And had you bothered to read the PM FAQ, you'd know that this mod is a frontlight, not a backlight.