Unreleased Gameboy Advance + Phone Hardware Hybrid

The interesting bits are near the bottom - https://medium.com/tech-talk/d823af31f7c

 

Sounds cool. Would have been neat to have 8 years ago. But I'll stick with my Android OS stuff now.

 

That's pretty cool. Too bad there are no pictures of it.

 

Sidekick was the phone to have back then.

Now danger products are the realm of the old and uncool.

funny how fast opinions change.

 

I reckon there'd not be much to look at, since they didn't add a cart slot or anything, just a GBA CPU, which wouldn't be visible from the outside. Install an emulator an a regular phone and you'd end up with the same thing, just without the hardware support.

Nevertheless, building a "frankenphone" by reverse engineering and integrating some CPU ripped from a retail handheld? That's awesome.

 

I meant more pictures of the interface. The article says that the device had the ability to switch between GBA games and calls at any time, pausing the game when you received a call and then resuming it when the call was finished. I'd like to see what that looked like.

 

well, the sidekick platform (when hiptop) was built upon a pretty useful backend that stored and sync'd all your information, before any else had such a setup. When that backend was shutdown the phones on the whole pretty much became useless since all you could really do was make calls. Even their web browser was reliant on the backend, as their web proxy would reformat the page into a format suitable for the phone before delivering it.

The device os itself was the foundation for Android though, Andy Rubin was a co-founder of Danger and also Android.

The way they merged the hardware sounds pretty interesting, piggy backing both systems into one so you can modify which one is outputting directly in the video buffer

 

Wow, all of those things Danger did were awesome!

(Here's a tidbit, though: If Danger and Nintendo couldn't get the rights sorted out for ROM distribution on Download Fun, then couldn't Danger have simply included a cartridge slot for GBA?)

 

probably would have made the phone too bulky / they were probably hoping to profit off taking a small cut of the download sales

 

Wow, what could have been. I would have much rather have had that than the Game Boy Micro.