Nintendo called it the Game Boy Advance Game Developers Conference, the place where developers were finally able to see the ins and outs of the GBA. With little real concrete information available about the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo finally lifted the lid on their upcoming handheld, well at least to developers. NDA's (Non-Disclosure Agreements) had to be signed before developers were even able to enter the conference left any real information available to the press non-existant, this was after all a developer's only conference. Yet inside source's at IGN revealed some concrete information regarding the system. Read on...

Better than SNES-quality capabilities. Including background "Mode 7" 3D effects and individual sprite scaling and rotation. Yoshi Story on the Game Boy Advance was used as a small demonstration of the capabilites

Wide format. Gamers will hold the system much like the NeoGeo Pocket Color. Control pad on the left, wider LCD screen in the middle, and four action buttons on the right.

No case design yet. Despite knowing how gamers will hold the system, Nintendo hasn't finalized what the system will look and feel like. So any images you find floating on the net are not the real-deal. Usually the last thing system designers work on is the casing, so expect that to be one of the last important things revealed about the Game Boy Advance.

Much better sound capabilities. Factor 5 was on-hand to put the system's sound capabilities to test, since the company has developed the sound tools for the Game Boy Advance. We were told ahead of time that the system will feature two sound-chips – the one already included in the Game Boy Color, and a brand-new chip capable of so much more. The new chip is reported to allow for two 8-Bit PCM channels at the same time, as well as excellent MIDI effects. Overall, the response was good, but "not perfect," as one of our sources told us.

Two to Four Player Link-up. While Nintendo didn't breathe word on the reported cell-phone capabilities, the company did say that multiplayer is a focus that developers should utilize, and will stress the feature to be used in any title possible. Up to four systems can link up together in Game Boy Advance-specific titles. One source told us the link cable port is pretty much identical to the one currently in use on the Game Boy Color.

No IR Link. Here's an interesting tidbit – the Game Boy Advance will not have an infrared port for data transfer. How this will effect existing Game Boy Color games played on the system remains to be seen.

Special copy protection. Nintendo is indeed aware of the growing problem of ROMs and emulators on the Internet. The company is actively placing forms of copy-protection on GBA cartridges to prevent the games from being dumped and distributed on the PC.

Development kits are now available. In fact, we've been told that US developers waiting for Game Boy Advance kits have already received theirs. So let the game development begin.

Release date. You guessed it – the Game Boy Color is selling like crazy in the States, so the release has been officially pushed to Q1 2001 in the US. But in Japan, the release date is still slated for August 2000.

And then there were the hardware demonstrations. To show off the Game Boy Advance's built-in AVI-style video decompressor, Nintendo played a few FMV clips through the hardware. But from the developers we talked to, they all state that the video would eat up too much ROM space to be practical in games.

The Game Boy Advance Yoshi's Story demonstration was also shown. One developer told us it was "awesome." Another, however, told us that game didn't look as nice as it does on the Nintendo 64. Nintendo also put a dolphin teaser on display, showing off a small dolphin leaping out of water through hoops.