Game Boy Color Background

March 22nd, 2008 by Mitch

The Game Boy Color is Nintendo's successor to the Game Boy and was released on October 21, 1998 in Japan and in November of 1998 in the United States. It features a color screen and is slightly thicker and taller than the Game Boy Pocket, but smaller than the original Game Boy.

The Game Boy Color was a response to pressure from game developers for a new and much more sophisticated system of playing, as they felt that the Game Boy, even in its latest incarnation, the Game Boy Pocket, was insufficient. The resultant product was backward compatible, a first for a handheld console system, and leveraged the large library of games and great installed base of the predecessor system. This became a major feature of the Game Boy line, since it allowed each new launch to begin with a significantly larger library than any of its competitors.

The processor, which is a Zilog Z80 workalike made by Sharp, has a clock speed twice as fast as that of the original Game Boy. The Game Boy Color also has three times as much memory as the original. The main difference between the Z80-like part found in Nintendo's machines and the actual Z80 is that Nintendo's machines do not have index registers.

The Game Boy Color also featured an infrared communications port for wireless linking. However, the feature was only supported in a few games, and the infrared port was dropped for the Game Boy Advance and later releases. The console was capable of showing up to 56 different colors simultaneously on screen from its palette of 32,768, and could add basic four-color shading to games that had been developed for the original Game Boy. It could also give the sprites and backgrounds separate colors, for a total of more than four colors. This, however, resulted in graphic artifacts in certain games; a sprite that was supposed to meld into the background was now colored separately, exposing the trick.