a few months ago I bought one of these: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/design...with-498-built-in-games-translucent-2gb-24382 the selling point that sealed the deal for me: backlight. who hasn't lamented the lack of backlight on the original game boy advance? well, I did. Anyway, looking at a few reviews out there about the machine, it became clear that this wasn't going to be the greatest thing in the world. for starters, anyone who owns (or owned) a dingoo a320 will be at home with this thing: less-than-perfect framerate, a puzzling inability to play games like tony hawk's pro skater; 320x240 screen. despite that, and the fact that the buttons are pretty stiff. it's perfectly playable. it's fun too, and once you get past the vertically stretched image (remember: 320x240!), and the lower framerate. As you can see in the screenshots on dealextreme, this thing has a cartridge slot, and it works! what won't play in it: warioware twisted, and gameboy/gameboy color games. it also has the same hardware limitations as the emulated roms, meaning you still won't get to play tony hawk's pro skater 2 (or any games that are somehow more demending) unless you get yourself a genuine gba sp. It's a fine clone and it's really cheap too, but it's kinda fragile. once I dropped it to the ground by mistake; from a height of 2 feet (it was on my bed), and suddenly there wasn't any image anymore. cue in me slamming my fist on it, and it worked again! but this time the framerate dropped to minus shit whenever anything moved in any games. since I assumed this was broken, I shrugged and threw the handheld across the room, from a height of 5 feet (I'm small). result? the games works perfectly, and there's nayry a crack to be seen anywhere on the screen and the rest of the handheld. So if you're the kind of guy who unlike me, doesn't go all gaston lagaffe with his stuff, and you can endure the device's shortcomings, you'll have a lot of fun with this. p.s.: it says it's got 498 games built-in, but don't let yourself be fooled: it's 97 gba games, 1 pokemon movie, and 400 nes games that are emulated and both looks and plays horribly on the gba's hardware (emulated or not).
fwiw I was just reading yesterday about a brand new GBA SP clone on it's way that is apparently going to trump all previous comings. Rather than using pure software emulation they apparently reverse engineered the hardware to produce a clone which can run at the real speed of a GBA, but also ramp speed up for GBA emulators (pocketnes etc). I'd link if I had it still, they're trying to get distribution picked up by DX though edit: heres more info on it, I definitely want one http://obscurehandhelds.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/the-gba-is-dead-long-live-the-gba/
man, if they pull this off, that'd be awesome. hope it's more solid than the one I have right now though
oh fuck, I forgot about that. there's a trojan but antiviruses blocks it. regardless, if you're intelligent enough to have your anti-virus running when you plug that thing into your computer, you'll be safe, and after deleting the executable and its autorun file, you won't have any problems afterward. gotta wonder what the fuck they were thinking, shoving a trojan into one of their own products.
It's from China, what do you expect. Loads of shit from China comes complete with Virus and so on. Yakumo
Why not just get a real GBA or GBA SP or GB Micro? A clone will never be as compatible and accurate as the real thing. Now, if you shoved some smartphone guts into a GBA body and put a bunch of really good emulators on it, that could potentially be cool.
I'm really interested in this "rev-eng'd" GBA! Seems like something worth it! Especially with an option to squash the screen to a 3:2 AR!
I agree something this interesting only comes around very seldom that when an english release is made I plan to buy at least 3 of them (or 1 if they're too expensive).
judging from the price on the russian website referenced in the article (and converted into us dollars), it should be around 80 bucks.
Not counting the flashcart, a real GBA is actually cheaper. GBA games are pretty cheap these days too.
I found where you can buy one, The link is: http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=15002396780 and its around $45 US Dollars
These clones are mostly targeted at the local market where a GBA costs a fucking ton of cash because of the stupid import tax I got a friend whos living in south america and every he flies back for something his friends over there ask him to buy them gadgets on the way back: local prices are easily 3 times higher TBH if you really want to play only GBA games then get a AGS-101 and a flashcart to load your games (unless you cool with luggin all the carts along) Else get a PSP: its dirt cheap these days and it can play almost anything you throw at it, plus PSP games.
