GDC09: DSi architect reveals unreleased Nintendo handhelds

by Randy Nelson on Mar 25th 2009 8:00PM

Masato Kuwahara, project leader on the development of Nintendo DSi, provided a special treat during his GDC panel appearance today: a first-ever glimpse at two Game Boy spin-offs that never were. The first a hefty predecessor to the Game Boy Advance; the second a touch-screen GBA SP.

Kuwahara says that the unnamed, would-be Game Boy Color successor was in development in 1995/96 and based on a 32-bit ARM RISC processor. The system, which evidently stalled in development due to poor graphics performance, is most likely the fabled Nintendo "Atlantis" project.

The second, more recently scuttled R&D project was basically a Game Boy Advance SP with a touch-screen fitted over its flip-up display. The unit's innards, as Kuwahara explained, were actually from a Game Boy Color. With a deep, serious tone in his voice he recounted that it "was not well received" by Nintendo management. The reason? It wasn't backlit (being GBC tech) and the touch overlay made it even darker. Shigeru Miyamoto evidently liked the general concept, though; Kuwahara says he likes to think his ill-received creation influenced the eventual development of Nintendo DS. You can see it after the break.

Tags: DS, dsi, gdc-2009, nintendo

Reader Comments (53)

Since Nintendo's outed it now I guess I can speak freely.....

The Game Boy predecessor was designed at ARM and was known internally as "Redrock". It had an 18.432MHz ARM703 processor which was a special for Sharp/Nintendo with an ARM7 (no T, no Thumb) and a 4K cache.

The real reason is was delayed was due to lack of availability of low power and low cost colour displays. The display was a colour STN (remember them?) so a little too slow, and also too power hungry. The GBA had to wait until Sharp came out with their very low power HR-TFT (High Reflective) display technology. Redrock had a backlit colour STN.

Regarding the graphics, it had only very minimal acceleration as the goal was SNES level and we explained that this was all easily achievable in software, as was GameBoy backwards compatibiity via emulation. Nintendo never believed this and added hardware acceleration and a whole GameBoy for backwards compatibility in GBA, but the 'mildly accelerated' graphics was very good. We knew it could be done in software since the Acorn Archimedes had better graphics than a SNES and had no acceleration hardware at all.

We even got David Braben's Frontier team (of Elite etc fame) to create a couple of full 3D demo games to show what could be done in purely software - this was close to PS1 level (3D, solid filled but not textured). However Nintendo still wanted their hardware sprites and didn't believe anything was possible without them. However, ultimately it was *display technology* more than anything else that killed it. GBA had to wait for the Sharp HR-TFT. That needed a different display controller than the colour STN one in Redrock.