WARNING! Screenshots enclosed! :)

[NovaProgramming]

And nathan.. maybe when Nova said 32bit, he was implying graphics resolutions with 32bit color depths, not 32bit CPU registers.

yeah... that's it :o

[Nexinarus]

but yeah nathan I think your right on that one, seems that it does run 32bit registers with 16bit screen res's, heh.

[adosorken]

Well, as far as I know the GBA works with 15 bits per pixel (32768 simultaneous colours, just like the SNES), and the PSX used 24 bits... got confused. 8)

That is one of the GBA's screen modes. Unfortunately, the GBA isn't fast enough to handle much of anything in that mode other than title screens and the like. Most games use one of the 256 color modes.

[toonski84]

Adsorken's got it. The GBA can display 16-bit color in two video modes, but it takes up too much memory to allow page flipping and the gba isnt fast enough to compensate:
http://www.cs.rit.edu/%7Etjh8300/CowBite...20Overview
http://www.bottledlight.com/docs/sdk.html

[adosorken]

Another thing to keep in mind is that the CPU and the PPU are not bound. That is to say that just because the CPU is 32 bit, doesn't mean the video display will be 32 bit. The whole video bits thing is mostly a product of the 8-vs-16 bits war back in the early 90s. Some things just never die. Usually though, when they talk about "64 bit graphics!" and whatnot, they are referring to the size of the data bus that the video circuit has. If anyone remembers the TurboGrafx 16 console...it was the first console to feature a 16 bit graphics chip. Did that mean it could display 65536 colors? No. It could only display 256 on the screen at once. Its data bus, however, was 16 bits wide. Actually, its video circuitry had a somewhat unique VCE, which constructed a total of sixteen 16-color palettes, each entry having 3 bits for Red, Green, and Blue. Hence, 9 bits of color, or 512 possible colors.

...and the only reason I know this about these consoles is because I program on them. Both of them (the GBA and the TurboGrafx 16).

[toonski84]

That'd be pretty sweet if the n64 had 64-bit registers though

gba programming seems like a fun thing to do. Looking at some of the code, it's seems easy enough to learn. I recall that being one of the main features of nintendo's recent consoles, as opposed to the supposedly impossible-to-program n64.

[adosorken]

Sure...and it'd have cost more than a small house at the time it was released

The Jaguar had a really badass CPU "collection"...it's just too bad no programmer, now or then, knew how to properly code for it. Hence why it was virtually dead on arrival. Sucks too coz considering Hasbro declared it an open system, you'd expect to see all kinds of games pouring forth from freeware developers, but...alas, coding for lil ole Tom & Jerry is far more difficult than most would want to do.

[relsoft]

So any link on GBA progging? Anyone?

I just hope it little Endian or bust!!!!!

[toonski84]

http://www.aaronrogers.com/ham/Day1/day1.php

[Fling-master]

If you use the set of tutorials that toonski pointed you to then you're pretty much restricted to learning how to program the GBA with something called HAMlib which actually is a pretty good library... however the catch is that you must register it to get rid of this intro thingy showing it was made with HAMlib at the start of all your programs.

A good tutorial that I used is found here: http://www.mdh165.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/d...cstuts.htm. It's in PDF format and goes over a number of things. Though it doesn't touch sound at all...