Game Boy Advance Bootstrap ROM

The Game Boy Advance (GBA) was the third major entry in the Game Boy line, being backwards-compatible with Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles. For its own games, the GBA was essentially a portable SNES, hence some of those games were ported with some upgrades...but due to the lack of backlight, the palettes were brightened to compensate, and hence looked washed-out after the Game Boy Advance SP (a more portable version with a backlight toggle) and Game Boy Player (a GameCube add-on) were released in 2003.

While the GBA was popular, it suffered from various low-quality licensed-property games, a failed attempt at "Game Boy Advance Video" (a line of very heavily-compressed cartoon episodes and full-length animated films), the nostalgia-tickling but ultimately-lackluster Classic NES Series, and the rise and quick fall of the e-Reader (although only for the US; the card-based add-on flourished in Japan).

The Game Boy Micro, an even more portable GBA with the backwards compatibility and add-on support rendered unusable, was released in 2005 to a decent response. With progressively more attention being put on the Nintendo DS, Japan stopped releasing GBA games in 2006 followed by Europe in 2007. The last game released was Samurai Deeper Kyo on February 12, 2008.

Unused Text
// Coded by Kawasedo

This message from one of the developers can be found in the bootstrap.

Kawasedo

His name also appears later in the bootstrap.

Unused Fade to GBC Mode
The bootstrap contains code to detect when a Game Boy or Game Boy Color cartridge is inserted into the slot (by reading bit 15 of REG_WAITCNT 4000204h). If it detects a GBC cartridge, it will fade to an image of a screen border, then perform a software switch to GBC mode (by setting bit 3 of REG_DISPCNT 4000000h).

However, Nintendo couldn't get their hardware to work this way, possibly due to cartridge voltage differences, so they used a switch to immediately switch to GBC mode instead.