Part 1: About the GameBoy Advance™

The GameBoy Advance SP™ (GBA) is a neat piece of technology marketed by Nintendo™ as a portable game console targeted mostly at young children. However, as it is the case with many other electronic devices, the GBA can be adapted for custom applications. For example, the GBA has been used as a movie player, a picture viewer or even in more advanced applications such as a robot controller, a global positioning system (GPS) or an automotive diagnostic system. This is mostly possible thanks to a pair of communication ports available in the GBA that can be used to send and receive information to and from other electronic devices (e.g. external switches, environmental control units, etc.)

Hardware

• 2.9in screen (240x160 max. resolution)
• 8 input keys
• Screen backlight switch
• Analog volume slider
• 3.7V 600mAH Lithium Ion Battery
• 32bit I/O Cartridge Port
• 4bit Link Port (4 modes including general purpose parallel & UART)
• 32bit ARM7TDMI CPU running on RISC architecture (16.78 MHz)
• 96 KB of video memory, 32KB of internal ram and 256KB of external ram

Part 2: GBA Software Development Kits >>
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