I’d imagine most people who read this
site don’t have a Gameboy
Advance, but I do, so that’s what you get to hear about.

     Around christmastime, I saw a little blurb over on slatch.com about flash memory for the Gameboy Advance. This is important because it means you can flash GBA
roms onto the cartridge and carry around more than one game at a time (This also means that depending on the quality of your moral fiber, you might not exactly have to pay for the games). Even better, it means that a whole programming community has sprung up
around the gameboy advance, writing all sorts of ridiculous and
entirely unneccesary software. As you well know, ridiculous and
uneccesary are my two favorite adjectives, so I did a bit of digging
around.

     The first great thing I found out is that
you aren’t limited to playing Gameboy Advance games on your Gameboy
Advance anymore. Emulators have been ported for a shitload of systems,
including the original gameboy, NES, SNES, Atari (Not released yet), and
even MAME a few classic arcade games, so you can load your GBA up with favorites from systems of days gone by. You can download all the GBA
emulation software from this page.

     Beyond emulation, developers for the
Gameboy Advance have coded TWO basic operating systems – GBA WinS and pogoshell, not to mention useful items like a calculator and guitar tuner.

     The sites to visit to keep abreast of the latest developments in the world of GBA development are gbadev.com and the GBA section of devrs.com. There’s also a ridiculously comprehensive tutorial to authoring Gameboy Advance games from scratch here, if you’re so inclined.

     I ordered my EZF II Adavnce from this company (They’re in Hong Kong). It arrived with no instructions whatsoever, but it was relatively easy to figure out with the assistance of google and some common sense. Fellow nerds will want to know that the cartridge I ordered is 256 Megs and currently holds five games (Metroid: Zero Mission, Super Mario Advance 2, Wario Ware, Advance Wars 2, and Mario Kart). In summary: WATCH OUT METROID ZERO MISSION.