But you couldn’t play Advance games on the Color, which was why the Advance had that distinctive squatty T shape. The T shape was specifically to prevent you from jamming an Advance cartridge into a Color.

[–] Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I got given a gameboy colour for Christmas when I was like 5 or so.

My parents bought me Spyro the dragon for GBA as my game while my sister got Harry potter for her gameboy colour.

Worst Christmas ever. Cause no gameboy game to play nothing open boxing day.

We also had to get batteries too haha.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You oculdn't play original Black & White games on GBA though, could you? Even though the GBA slot was designed to take original games?

They've done a lot of that kind of thing; the original GameBoy cartridges had chamfered edges and a corner notched, GBC games (the clear cart "GBC-Only" ones, not the Black "GB games that will have color if you run them on a GBC" games) lacked those chamfers so they wouldn't even begin to slide in, plus the "Gameboy Color" logo area was convex instead of concave, and the power switch notch wasn't there.

Gameboy Advance cartridges had a similar cross-section to GBC games but were shorter and had a flare at the top so you couldn't insert one into a Gameboy Color. I don't think a GBA could play original GB games even though they would physically attach. The GBA could play GBC games, they would stand a bit more than an inch proud of the cartridge slot if you did though.

There was a GBA Mini, which I think dropped compatibility with GBC games? And I don't know about the clamshell Advance, the Advance SP was it called?

DS games were a very different shape, they were closer to SD cards. Early models of the DS had GBA cartridge ports and would accept GBA games only, not even Color ones. That port was also used for some peripherals for DS games. It was deprecated in later models, and then they added the tab on the side at some point so that newer DS games couldn't fit in older DSes...I'm the only human outside of Sentinel Island to not own a Nintendo DS (even Jesus had one) so I have only a vague idea of what a DSi was compared to a 3DS.

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

A lot of what you said was blatantly wrong. Original Gameboy carts were compatible with everything up to the NDS. Each new system up to that point only expanded compatibility.

In fact, backwards compatibility was one of the largest selling points of each new Gameboy generation. No need to ditch your old game library, you can keep playing them with the new console. No need to worry about carrying multiple consoles around, cuz the newest console always plays your current library on top of expanding compatibility. You could slam an original copy of Tetris (which came bundled with the original GameBoy) into a DS, and it would boot up just fine.

The first time they dropped backwards compatibility was the DSi, which didn’t have a gameboy port at all. IIRC the GameBoy Micro also didn’t support anything before the GBA, but it released around the same time as the DSi, so most players just ended up using their NDS to play anyways.

Then the 3DS was fully compatible with the NDS and DSi (at least, what few games actually existed for the DSi) library.