Gaming giant Nintendo Friday said it has inked a deal that will allow its latest generation of consoles to play over wireless networks.
The Japanese concern said Motorola is supplying it with high-speed, low-power chipsets to power a new wireless adapter that plugs into the back of both Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Advance SP products. The company said the adapter will debut in Japan first half of 2004 but did not give any timelines for releases in the U.S. or Europe.
Motorola said its chipset contains a 32-bit RISC architecture baseband processor and a low-power RF transceiver that operates in the globally available 2.4GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical Band spectrum. The technology offers high-speed data rate by using a TDMA (time division multiple access)
The Schaumburg, Ill.-based company said the chipset lets up to five players to play each other wirelessly.
“We have provided Nintendo a full wireless system solution focused on the end-user,” Motorola’s Semiconductor Products president and CEO Scott Anderson said. “I am confident this will significantly improve the game-playing experience and as a result, attract many veteran and novice game enthusiasts to Nintendo’s offerings.”
And if the promise of playing games wirelessly is not enticing enough, Nintendo’s new adaptor will also ship with the new Game Boy Advance software “Pokemon FireRed” and “Pokemon LeafGreen.”
“This is one of the most important solutions for portable gaming,” Nintendo R&D general manager Satoru Okada said in a statement. “Motorola’s experience, such as, their antenna technology enabled us to develop a new wireless game system. This accomplished a high quality wireless gaming system. Game Boy Advance users will experience a new style of gaming and comfort.”
Motorola has been a major force in wireless gaming for sometime. The company was one of four founding members of the Mobile Games Interoperability (MGI) Forum to build a “Universal Mobile Games Platform.”
The initiative launched in March 2001 by Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens IC Mobile, and Nokia lets game developers produce and deploy mobile games across multiple game servers and wireless networks enabling them to be played over different mobile devices.