How Graphics worked on the Nintendo Game Boy Color | MVG

In 1998 Nintendo released the Game Boy Color, an upgrade to the original DMG Game Boy. The Game Boy Color (GBC) was fully backward compatible with the Game Boy but came with some improvements to the original architecture. In this episode we take a look at the Graphics subsystem of the GBC and discover some of the technical achievements developers were able to pull off.

Links:

Social Media Links :

#Nintendo #GBC #Graphics

[CodaBroda]

Love that you added how GBC was able to “upgrade” older games with color! That was a mystery of mine as a kid; very cool they had a master list to retroactively set the color palettes.

[ModernVintageGamer]

A Few corrections :
1:10 - Xekkusu is actually titled X or X (エックス, Ekkusu) in Japan.
7:30 - Technically VBlank occurs at any scan-line above 144.
9:26 - Hi Color mode can display around 2000 colors instead of 4000

[jwilder]

I'd always wondered how my GB color was able to colorize my older games.

[AttilaTheHun]

Would have bern nice to show the real screen of the GBC more often. People get the wrong impression it was this contrasty and colorful on the original Hardware.

[poptheweasel]

Game Boy Color is probably my favorite Nintendo handheld. It's weird, it's rather overlooked, the library is decent at first glance, but when you start searching for the unknown games, like Bootlegs and cancelled games, I swear, you'll never find a more underrated handheld.

Some of my favorites include: Zook Hero Z, a fantastic Mega Man bootleg that combines Classic gameplay with MMX style movement, it's fairly long for a GBC game, has great level design, fantastic soundtrack using Capcom's soundfonts, and is a joy to play.
Infinity also comes to mind, a cancelled GBC RPG that had SO much potential, being made by RPG lovers, with sound engineering by Mathew Valente, the composer for Chrono Resurrection. The battle system is unique, the story is surprisingly detailed, there's quite a lot of lore, and even the source code is available online, so hey, if you wanna work on a GBC game, give it a shot!
There are plenty of other bootlegs as well that are awesome, like Pocket Monster Saphire, a good strategy RPG with horribly mistranslated Pokemon, Fire Emblem GBC, a decent if slow Fire Emblem game, and even a few decent RPGs, if you can read Chinese, that is.
I'll also mention Mythri, which like Infinity, is a RPG with a demo, but it isn't that good standalone. The story was pretty good for its time, and you can read about it online somewhere.

But with all these games, there are still some fantastic ones out there. Handheld Underground has all the bootlegs you'd want, while the cancelled games can be found by typing their name and GBC. I love these games and I want more people to love them, so I'm spreading the word!

[faustianblur]

Horizontal Blank interrupts were the key to getting that classic Mode 7 perspective on SNES too. Mode 7 allowed the SNES to apply transformations like scale, skew and rotation to a 2D image, but by scaling each horizontal line separately developers could make it appear as if the image was shrinking as it receded into the distance (up the screen). It seems in implementing H-Blank on the GBC, Nintendo enabled the same effect (minus the arbitrary skew and rotation).

[alexander_mejia]

Thank you for putting these together. I know you’re putting a ton of effort into these and I don’t know how you find the time.

[BrianM]

It's really fascinating how much you can get out of the Gameboys. Recently I tried out the Resident Evil prototype on the GBC and was quite suprised at how well it captured the original style of the game.

[sawbonesquad]

The first gaming system ever bought for me. Nostalgic. The GBC had a lot of good exclusives, sad it was short lived due to the GBA.

[overlordalfredo]

Hamtaro Ham-Hams unite is one great example of what the GBC was capable of.
That game looks like a cute little GBA game, but it is from the GBC Era and also runs without any slowdowns at all!

Such a good system!

[technodaz]

I remember when my brother bought a vga card and told me I could have his ega ...put it in my 8086 only to discover what 2 fps was like for the first time...going from 4 to to 16 colours was obviously a task and a half for my little cpu.

[MRooodddvvv]

"Why change what isnt broken". Somebody need to say that to modern APIs developers

[davidoros]

One of my favorite aspects of the GBC was being able to change the palette that the system used for GB games. Playing Pokémon Blue with negative colors (is that right?) or switching from just blue to a blu-ish green was awesome. I feel like not many people know about it and while it was kind of mentioned in the video it would have been cool to see it displayed.

You switched the color palette by pressing directional buttons or directional and A or B while on the “Game Boy” screen.

[r.]

Watching vids of 1990's tech in 2020... I never imagined this 'future' back then lol

[kemi]

The engineers at Nintendo did some really clever tricks to overcome the hardware limitations.

[Kafei]

Toki Tori on GBC simulates prallax scrolling. Here's what Collin Van Ginkel of Two Tribes BV told me about how they achieved this (this here is a direct quote, not my words):

"The multilayer scrolling is actually faked by having a 'video' of a scrolling 64x64 pixel pattern stored in ROM that's being streamed every frame. If I remember correctly, this is also where most of our ROM size went to. The rest of the game was really tiny and Nintendo didn't have any smaller cartridges, so we thought we'd just use it for that then."

[RashaEX]

That edit at around 5:40 is unbelievably clean - it's insane that you reach a level of quality like this every single week!

[MousePounder]

Every one of these videos is simply fantastic. Thanks MVG for all the hard work!

[zeldajunkielol]

Wow, this not only explained how the gameboy color works but also helped me understand a bit of game design. Thanks!

[fensoxx]

In the span of a few months this has become my favorite channel. Thanks man for all the detailed reporting on these old systems. Fascinating.I can see a lot of hard work goes into these.