Manipulation of palette registers during display allows for a rarely used high color mode, capable of displaying more than 2,000 colors on the screen simultaneously. This method of upgrading the color count results in graphic artifacts in certain games for example, a sprite that is supposed to meld into the background is sometimes colored separately, making it easily noticeable. In the 7-color modes, the sprites and backgrounds are given separate color schemes, and in the 10-color modes the sprites are further split into two differently-colored groups however, as flat black (or white) was a shared fourth color in all but one (7-color) palette, the overall effect is that of 4, 6, or 8 colors. The console is capable of displaying up to 56 different colors simultaneously on screen from its palette of 32,768 (8×4 color background palettes, 8x3+transparent sprite palettes), and can add basic four-, seven- or ten-color shading to games that had been developed for the original 4-shades-of-grey Game Boy. The feature is only supported in a small number of games, so the infrared port was dropped from the Game Boy Advance line, to be later reintroduced with the Nintendo 3DS, though wireless linking would return in the Nintendo DS line using Wi-Fi. The Game Boy Color features an infrared communications port for wireless linking.
The screen resolution is the same as the original Game Boy at 160×144 pixels. The Game Boy Color has three times as much memory as the original (32 kilobytes system RAM, 16 kilobytes video RAM). The processor, which is a Zilog Z80 workalike made by Sharp with a few extra (bit manipulation) instructions, has a clock speed of approximately 8 MHz, twice as fast as that of the original Game Boy. The technical specifications for the console are as follows: SizeĪpproximately 78 mm (3.1 in) x 133.5 mm (5.26 in) x 27.4 mm (1.08 in) (WxHxD)Ģ.3 inch reflective thin-film transistor (TFT) color liquid-crystal display (LCD) On March 23, 2003, the Game Boy Color was discontinued. The resultant product was backward compatible with all existing Game Boy software, a first for a handheld system, allowing each new Game Boy family launch to begin with a significantly larger game library than any of its competitors. Nintendo developed the console concurrently with its successor, the Game Boy Advance (which was codenamed “Atlantis” at the time).