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This is the Nintendo
Gameboy Colour section. I split this off from the original Nintendo Gameboy
section as some of the Gameboy Colour games will not play on the original
Gameboy and this makes it easier to distinguish between the two. I have a
smallish selection of Nintendo Gameboy Colour Games, as well as Nintendo Gameboy
Colour Consoles and
replacement hardware. Click any of these links to take you to the appropriate
section.
The Game Boy Colour
(ゲームボーイカラー, Gēmu Bōi Karā?, shortened to GBC) is Nintendo's successor to the
Game Boy and was released on October 21, 1998 in Japan and in November 19, 1998
in North America and November 23, 1998 in Europe. It features a colour screen
and is slightly thicker and taller than the Game Boy Pocket, but smaller than
the original Game Boy. As of March 31, 2006, the Game Boy and Game Boy Colour
combined have sold 118.7 million units worldwide.
The Game Boy Colour 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.
Nintendo made black cartridges that were compatible with the Game Boy Colour,
the older Super Game Boy and the original Game Boy. The black colour
distinguished these special cartridges from the grey Game Boy carts and the
transparent Game Boy Colour carts. The black cartridges had notches in the
corner like old Game Boy cartridges, allowing an original Game Boy to be turned
on when they were inserted, while the Game Boy Colour cartridges did not.
Special Game Boy Colour palettes were built into the black carts, making it
impossible to change their palette. Game Boy Colour games also feature the
different colour cartridges for the European and American releases of the
Pokémon games.
The processor, which is a Z80 clone made by Sharp with a few extra (bit
manipulation) instructions, has a clock speed of approx. 8 MHz, twice as fast as
that of the original Game Boy. The Game Boy Colour also has four times as much
memory as the original (32 kilobytes system RAM, 16 kilobytes video RAM).
Additionally, the Game Boy Colour could address more ROM, allowing games as much
as eight times the maximum size of those for the original Game Boy. The screen
resolution was the same as the original Game Boy, which is 160x144 pixels.
The Game Boy Colour 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 colours 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 colours, for a total of more than four colours.
This, however, resulted in graphic artefacts in certain games; a sprite that was
supposed to meld into the background was now coloured separately, exposing the
trick.
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