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delete12345

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 17, 2017
19,884
Boston, MA


The movie used to be sold on a Game Boy Advance cartridge, licensed by Nintendo, and distributed to local retailers. It's still an interesting thing to see it in real life like that.

Dunno if this is allowed in the Gaming Forum. Please move thread to EtcetEra Forum if it's not. Thanks.
 

rpm

Into the Woods
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
12,367
Parts Unknown
240 x 160 at a god awful framerate, the true way to watch Shrek

Shrek on a cart is cool, but what about Shrek 1 & 2 on the same cart

450
 

ImaPlayThis

Member
Oct 26, 2017
2,116
I saw vids about this on tiktok recently, it's crazy that these existed, no idea if these were a thing in the UK but if they were I totally would have bought one or two of them
 

Vonocourt

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,646
Pretty sure licensing cartoons for GBA Video was one of the reasons Majesco was able to stay afloat after their push to become big time with Advent Rising failed.
 

Stooge

Member
Oct 29, 2017
11,338
Yeah, these did pretty well actually at the time.

You have to remember smart devices didn't exist that could handle video, laptops were hella expensive, heavy and had bad battery life. I had a portable DVD player back then and it was pretty pricey as well, with iffy battery life but was definitely the way to go.

These were just garbage quality kids movies that got thrown onto these carts so that parents could play the movie that made their kids STFU in the backseat of the car.
 

Akela

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,851
GBA Video is legendary.



High fidelity mobile video. Who wouldn't want to watch Shrek on this format?
 

Pop-O-Matic

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
12,987
Yeah, there was a whole line of GBA Video carts back then. Nintendo's way of cashing in on a trend of children's portable media players that was happening around that time. As expected, it was pretty much all cartoons.
 

Zonic

Member
Oct 25, 2017
33,608
240 x 160 at a god awful framerate, the true way to watch Shrek

Shrek on a cart is cool, but what about Shrek 1 & 2 on the same cart

450
Just as a reminder, the carts were only 64MB compared to the usual 32MB. Meaning they had to reduce the resolution even moreso to 112p from 240p for the single movie carts.

& for those double movie carts, each movie had to be compressed to about 32mb.
 

Platy

Member
Oct 25, 2017
27,818
Brazil
I know someone who still has the Sonic X anime episodes on the gba cart

he considers them a very important milestone in sonic's decline =P
 

andymcc

Member
Oct 25, 2017
26,401
Columbus, OH
i remember these shits when i worked @ Electronic's Boutique. some kid tried to trade in some Dragon Ball GT episodes in this format and we didn't accept them. His mom got mad at us.
 

ramenline

Member
Jan 9, 2019
1,300
lol i deadass had this as kid. pretty sure it was just shrek 2 though. i also had one of the spongebob ones.
 
Oct 25, 2017
4,825
New York City
Fun fact: the team that made the video codec is Mobiclip, the team that was later bought by Nintendo and became NERD:


They gained their initial success due to their work on GBA video, and they moved on to doing video codecs for the Nintendo DS before becoming part of Nintendo. They've since worked on several emulators for Nintendo, and also the "super stable 3D" for the New 3DS that keeps the 3D stable by doing eye tracking through the 3DS cameras.
 

Tab

Member
Nov 23, 2017
1,286
I'm like 90% sure I had this growing up, a Pokemon one too. Also, based on what I can find online, these were first released in 2004. The GBA SP released in 2003, and by then would have been the main model for the GBA, so imagine having this without a headphone jack, and forcing everyone around you to listen to Shrek coming out of the GBA's shitty speaker
 

BasilZero

Member
Oct 25, 2017
36,495
Omni
Huh, didnt even know the GBA had cartridges which were sold as movies. Always thought the PSP UMDs introduced that.


Edit: Oh man, that looks awful lmao.
 

FinFunnels

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
5,610
Seattle
I had some Pokémon ones and I thought it was really cool. The video and audio quality was pretty bad, but I thought it was a worthy trade off to be able to watch Pokémon anywhere on my Game Boy.

A few years later, I got really into ripping DVDs and watching them on my PSP lol. I also collected UMD videos as well.
 

RingoGaSuki

Member
Apr 22, 2019
2,459
I had one with two Pokemon episodes on it, For Ho-Oh the Bells Toll and... A Hot Water Battle I think? Looking back the quality was atrocious, but I loved it at the time.
 

RCSI

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
1,840
Huh, didnt even know the GBA had cartridges which were sold as movies. Always thought the PSP UMDs introduced that.


Edit: Oh man, that looks awful lmao.

I thought the same too, never knew these GBA video's existed. While I saw the UMD's as silly, I still thought playing my own encoded video on the PSP was neat and usable feature.
 
May 30, 2018
3,406
Fun fact: the team that made the video codec is Mobiclip, the team that was later bought by Nintendo and became NERD:


They gained their initial success due to their work on GBA video, and they moved on to doing video codecs for the Nintendo DS before becoming part of Nintendo. They've since worked on several emulators for Nintendo, and also the "super stable 3D" for the New 3DS that keeps the 3D stable by doing eye tracking through the 3DS cameras.
this is tight. i remember actimagine and these things but never knew they turned into NERD.
 

Billy Awesomo

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,769
New York, New York
I still have my Sponge bob and fairly odd parents video carts. The quality wasn't terrible they were passible. Imma impressed that all of shrek fits into one cartridge time wise.
 

anaa

Unshakable Resolve
Member
Jun 30, 2019
1,560
Incredible that YouTube can detect the copyrighted content coming from the bit-crushed GBA speaker/sound chip.

citation: the "video unavailable, watch on YouTube" message you get on embedded videos with copyright Flagged content.
 
Oct 27, 2017
4,969
Just as a reminder, the carts were only 64MB compared to the usual 32MB. Meaning they had to reduce the resolution even moreso to 112p from 240p for the single movie carts.

& for those double movie carts, each movie had to be compressed to about 32mb.

It seems absolutely amazing as a technical achievement. Yet the same company refused to use DVDs in the Gamecube.

Just the most Nintendo thing in the world.
 

Mona

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
26,151
i cant for the life of me understand why GBA cant display its own resolution at atleast 24fps
 
Nov 4, 2017
7,408
Still looks better than Cyberpunk 2077 on a PS4/XoneS...

I imagine these things must have been great back in the day for maintaining the peace on long drives with kids. As a poor undergrad, I'd put compressed episodes of shows like Family Guy and Futurama on my SuperCard for my DS so I could watch them on the train or flying to visit my family. I'd also have a decent MP3 library on there. I think people forget how hard entertainment on the go was before smart phones and tablets.