Nintendo Co, Japan's second-largest maker of video-game consoles, is asking its liquid-crystal display makers to come up with a better small-sized flat-panel display for the next version of its Game Boy hand-held video-game console.
"Screen quality is everything," Nintendo engineer Tsuyoshi Kiyuna told a group of executives from display panel and component makers at a seminar in Tokyo last week.
"I want you to make a better screen to solve some of the problems we have now," he said.
Display quality is crucial to the success of a hand-held game player, a point Nintendo learned first hand when some users balked at the dark screen the company used in the first version of its Game Boy Advance player.
The Kyoto-based company addressed the complaints by revamping the player as the Game Boy Advance SP with a new, brighter screen lit from the sides.
Screen quality continues to plague Nintendo. One issue yet to be solved in the Game Boy Advance SP, which was released in February, is the presentation of colors. Dust trapped within the screen and accentuated by lighting has also dogged Nintendo.
Even with the better screen, colors still appear with a whitish tinge while black also doesn't display well, Kiyuna said.
Nintendo, which controls about 90 percent of the hand-held game market, hasn't said when it will release a follow-up model to the Game Boy Advance SP.
Besides a screen able to display colors more vibrantly, the company, which also makes the GameCube video-game console, also wants a screen free of dust.
Nintendo is asking panel makers to change the manufacturing process to reduce debris captured within the layers of a display, requesting that newer displays be made in dust-free clean rooms like those in which semiconductors are manufactured.
"The majority of complaints from [Game Boy Advance] SP users is about dust," Kiyuna said. "We want a dust-free screen and users of our next-generation hand-held game machine won't be happy unless we solve these problems."
Nintendo has yet to selected the supplier of LCD panels for its next hand-held console.
The company will decide after studying mockups and business proposals from screen makers.
Sharp Corp, Japan's largest maker of liquid-crystal displays, is the sole supplier of LCD panels for Game Boy Advance as well as the Game Boy Advance SP.
One other requirement for the new screen will be that it must consume less or equal power compared with the version used in the Game Boy Advance SP, Kiyuna said.
A Game Boy Advance SP panel consumes about 71 milliwatts of power, he said.
TAIWAN IS TAIWAN: US Representative Tom Tiffany said the amendment was not controversial, as ‘Taiwan is not — nor has it ever been — part of Communist China’ The US House of Representatives on Friday passed an amendment banning the US Department of Defense from creating, buying or displaying any map that shows Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The “Honest Maps” amendment was approved in a voice vote on Friday as part of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for the 2026 fiscal year. The amendment prohibits using any funds from the act to create, buy or display maps that show Taiwan, Kinmen, Matsu, Penghu, Wuciou (烏坵), Green Island (綠島) or Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼) as part of the PRC. The act includes US$831.5 billion in
The paramount chief of a volcanic island in Vanuatu yesterday said that he was “very impressed” by a UN court’s declaration that countries must tackle climate change. Vanuatu spearheaded the legal case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, which on Wednesday ruled that countries have a duty to protect against the threat of a warming planet. “I’m very impressed,” George Bumseng, the top chief of the Pacific archipelago’s island of Ambrym, told reporters in the capital, Port Vila. “We have been waiting for this decision for a long time because we have been victims of this climate change for
Taiwan is hosting the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) for the first time, welcoming more than 400 young linguists from 43 nations to National Taiwan University (NTU). Deputy Minister of Education Chu Chun-chang (朱俊彰) said at the opening ceremony yesterday that language passes down knowledge and culture, and influences the way humankind thinks and understands the world. Taiwan is a multicultural and multilingual nation, with Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, Hakka, 16 indigenous languages and Taiwan Sign Language all used, Chu said. In addition, Taiwan promotes multilingual education, emphasizes the cultural significance of languages and supports the international mother language movement, he said. Taiwan has long participated
MASSIVE LOSS: If the next recall votes also fail, it would signal that the administration of President William Lai would continue to face strong resistance within the legislature The results of recall votes yesterday dealt a blow to the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) efforts to overturn the opposition-controlled legislature, as all 24 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers survived the recall bids. Backed by President William Lai’s (賴清德) DPP, civic groups led the recall drive, seeking to remove 31 out of 39 KMT lawmakers from the 113-seat legislature, in which the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) together hold a majority with 62 seats, while the DPP holds 51 seats. The scale of the recall elections was unprecedented, with another seven KMT lawmakers facing similar votes on Aug. 23. For a
RSS