Nintendo GameBoy eases down the road

Nintendo's latest iteration on the popular GameBoy family, the GameBoy Advance SP, shows just how much can be packed into a handheld when tightly focused ASIC design meets up with advances in displays.

Sporting a new 160 x 240-pixel front-lit thin-film-transistor LCD from Sharp in a small clamshell design, the SP brings much of the console-gaming experience of years past to your hip pocket. Two white LEDs supply the reflective LCD screen's front lighting through a diffuser panel-a key technology to keep power consumption low.

Leveraging shrinking power requirements, the SP improves upon the previous GameBoy Advance by adding a rechargeable built-in 600-mA-hr lithium-ion battery-useful for gaming enthusiasts and those weary of single-use batteries. Game play times of 10 and 18 hours with backlight off and on respectively are claimed. Given a measured consumption of ~200 milliwatts for Donkey Kong under front-lit conditions, the 10-hour figure squares well with available battery capacity.

The deceptively simple component set for the SP centers on a Nintendo-custom 32-bit ARM processor core, containing 128 kbytes of on-chip memory, as the primary gaming engine. Another 256 kbytes of off-chip SRAM supplied by Fujitsu supplements the working-memory footprint.

An audio subsystem chip-manufacturer unknown-handles all the audio conversion to drive both the built-in speaker and optional headphones. A Li-ion charge controller from Renesas and a dual switching regulator-again, of unknown source-round out the major components. Total component count comes in at just under 200, including all passives, odd-forms and connectors.

Estimated cost-of-goods-sold for the GameBoy Advance SP is slightly more than half of the $99 purchase price, so the profit bloodbath typical of many game console models seems to have been averted. By comparison, the original GameBoy Advance, which came to market in the second half of 2001, is still being sold for about $70, lacking both battery and LCD front light.

The modest component set could be packed into a still smaller space than the SP's already diminutive form factor, highlighting the potential for gaming to ride along in other handheld devices. Indeed, competition for Nintendo may come in the form of Nokia's N-Gage phone/game combo product slated for late-2003 introduction. TapWave is also a developing a PalmOS-enabled game device with a similar release schedule.

All of these product examples point up the growing popularity-and shrinking costs-of gaming technology in a mobile form factor. Indeed, when I asked my kids to pick between the GameBoy SP and the TV-bound Nintendo system they own, the mobility of the SP won the day unanimously. Surprising testimony to the value of portability even when visual quality and spacious controller pads are sacrificed.

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