DSi project leader reveals unreleased Nintendo handhelds
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Mar 27th 2009 5:31AM
posted Mar 27th 2009 5:31AM
Man, the folks over at this year's Game Developer's Conference are having all the fun -- and now the Joystiq crew just got a rare look at two Game Boy models that never made it to production, unveiled during a talk by the project leader for the development of the DSi, Masato Kuwahara. The first, developed around 1995, was labeled "Game Boy Advance Predecessor," and was based on a 32-bit ARM RISC processor. The project stalled in development due to poor graphics performance. The second device was essentially a touch-screen Game Boy Advance SP, with a clamshell case thrown in for good measure. Apparently, this one didn't make the cut due to its lack of a backlit display. We've got a picture of that one for you too -- and it does look somewhat familiar. Check it after the break.
Strange, that second image looks like a production GBA, which has backlight and surely is no Game Boy Color. Touchscreen on the flipped up screen surely sucked though ;)
It's pretty interesting to see some of the in between steps Nintendo does, thanks.
great to see unreleased hardware, but even greater to own one of these in 2009 (especially if it's in good nick):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualboy
Unpopular and/or unreleased hardware FTW.
A second that, I nabbed one off of eBay last year, $60 with 10 games. It was an amazing deal!
Red Alert is definitely my favorite
@ Scott Weiss,
i believe it's called Red Alarm, not Red Alert
The VirtualBoy should have been on that list and not released. :)
Careful Chickenator, people will hate you if you're too... stingie!
http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/lastalert/index.html
I saw these images, albeit from a different angle, on Wired yesterday. I love seeing what could have been in the world of gaming, as it really gets you thinking what we could have ended up with, good or bad.
I remember seeing the proposed CD-ROM add-on that Sony and Nintendo worked on for the SNES, which ended up becoming the Playstation.
http://www.consoledatabase.com/consoleinfo/snescdrom/index.html
How could that second prototype be based on the GBA SP? It's dated to 1998. More likely, it's what the slide says it is: a touchscreen adaptor kit for the Gameboy Color, which they happened to fit to a GBA SP for convenience when taking the picture.
Interesting, more companies should do this!
I guess that the touchscreen Gameboy served as the foundation for the DS, and they were able to overcome the backlight issue by embedding it into the monitor.
I wish they could have created a handheld with higher resolution and fully compatible with SNES/N64 games without too much porting/emulation.
Fake!
The GBA predecessor looks like someone left it sitting on a space heater overnight.
I love this stuff. Thanks for putting it up.
RISC is good.
cisc is better
Gameboy SP is still my favourite handheld game console... perfect size, great game library, and (finally!) a backlit screen. The "headphone adapter" requirement was stupid, but I don't have any desire to listen to MIDI soundtracks through my Shures anyways.
Then I traded it in. At EBGames. For a $65 credit. Ah, I was fourteen and foolish.
I did too!!! I just bought another Platinum SP yesterday off eBay! I will never sell it again!
i know how you fell !!
i trade in my SP all my pkmn games including gbc pkmnGold (wich was 0.0 dollars practicali thaey took it and didn giveme a cent). i should have kept my pkmn games cuz i still have mi GBA(normal)
NEVER TRADE GAMES IN!