Last week, new footage of the original 1996 Tomb Raider game running on Nintendo's Game Boy Advance was shared online.
As you might already know, it's part of 'OpenLara' - a classic Tomb Raider open-source engine that's seen the game ported across to all sorts of platforms.
The latest version requires nothing more than a Game Boy Advance, and a compatible cartridge that can run the game. Game developer and YouTuber MVG has now taken a look at this "impossible port" project - making it clear how there are no secrets or tricks in play:
"This is nothing but code running on the GBA hardware, there's nothing in the middle that's helping this game push polygons or its framerate faster than it normally does. So this again is just a real piece of technical wizardry and fantastic optimisation that does take advantage of the GBA's strengths and really understands its limitations as well."
MVG also asked the project's developer Timur 'XProger' Gagiev about the possibility of getting the entire contents of the game onto the GBA in the future:
"He said it would be [possible], he is confident that the full game - all the levels, including the FMV, could potentially fit onto a 32 megabyte GBA ROM cartridge, and that is pretty impressive, we'll just have to wait and see."
For now, this GBA version includes the first two levels and Lara's house. What do you think of this amazing GBA version of Tomb Raider? Leave a comment down below.
[source youtu.be]
Comments 13
And I thought it was cool at the time that they made a top-down 2D Tomb Raider game for the GBA. I always liked a good de-make and I enjoyed that one back then. I saw the MVG video earlier and it was fascinating to hear how they made this happen and to see how well it runs on a system that was not designed to do anything of the sort.
I would like to point out that something like this was done many years ago on Nokia's N-Gage phone/game console hybrid. It was also a 32-bit console and it happened to be one of the competitors, at least on paper, to the GBA.
@ModdedInkling That was already point out by MVG in this video. That game though was an impressive port, the TATE style screen makes it difficult to play due to the squish viewpoint.
Why didn't they figure that out back when the thing was relevant dang it.
I know I was quite impressed when I got my PSP even a year after it came out, playing Tomb Raider on a GBA would have been quite amazing back then...minus the batteries probably lasting about 10 minutes.
“THE IMPOSSIBLE PORT” MVG never fails in his decent into clickbait schlock.
@Specter_of-the_OLED
That port was done when it was considerably harder to develop them compared to a leisure project on a well documented platform. Wake me up when they have this running on the 32x.
I used to play it on my N-gage. Never understood why the phone flopped. It was genius but gba was too much of a competition, I guess..
Ps. I really want to play the game now
Crazy. I always wonder who these guys are, dedicating so much of their time to something so strange, anonymously at that. Does he work as a coder and this is his fun project?
@NintendoWife
For such People it is like a Puzzle, they want to figure out how to solve it.
Keeps the Brain fresh and this helps, as a side effect, in the real Profession.
Wow, even though I can't be bothered to actually watch through the video, this article was actually eye-opening for me, since I'd just scrolled past the first headline on this project the other day assuming it was one of those "shove-a-console's-guts-into-an-old-handheld's-shell" sort of deal. The thought that in some alternate reality this full-fat polybeast could've been legitimately run on the same lil' thing I played Circle of the Moon and Golden Sun on is actually low-key mindblowing.
For anyone who didn't grow up in this era, there was a distinct order to what sort of porting wizardry could possibly be achieved on Nintendo's handhelds, fanboy or not. The GBC was the first system that could faithfully reproduce (and sometimes improve upon) full NES games; I had great fun playing Super Mario Bros. Deluxe on it. The GBA was the first system that could master the sophistication of SNES games; Super Mario Advance's port of SMW on it was an acclaimed demonstration of its power.
Nobody dared dream, though, that a full, polygonal N64/PS1 behemoth could be played on a Game Boy until Mario 64 DS came along the next generation and blew all our minds (whatever the port's quirks may be in retrospect). The crazy thought that this could've been achieved a full hardware generation sooner makes calling this an "impossible port" well deserved, however cranky the Nokia fans in here might be that their odd little technological sidebranch never really caught on.
I tried it out yesterday on my gba and its mind blowing... it even supports the rumble function of the eazy flash de...
@SalvorHardin You say it like it’s child’s play. Well documented, developers would of had access to developer manuals and Nintendo back in the day. The real case is somebody used there free time to reverse engineer and recompile into assembly language. Used intense levels of optimisation to get the first two levels running on a console on par with a SNES. Now they wish to port the rest of the game by redoing all the textures and audio so that it is capable of fitting into a 32MB cart. But yeah. Not that impressive for something in somebodies free time. I’m guessing you didn’t watch the video as it’s “clickbait”
@UglyCasanova takes a lot of optimization and knowledge about the hardware..
they usually didn't put much effort into ports back then.
it was way easier for them to make a 2D game for GBA and leave the 3D port to more powerful systems like ngage where they don't need much optimization.
@SalvorHardin I don't know you, but I think you should try having fun once in a while.
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