2001 Planet Interactive
Platform: Gameboy Advance
Next up in the archives are a set of Game Boy Advance prototypes, though they are in a special compiled format where the prototypes are meant to run within a Windows executable. The prototypes are Action Man, Casper, Cube, Kong and RotatingMenus.
When you run the executables, you just get a blank window with “EMA (C) Planet Interactive” title. Upon further investigation, we stumbled across a Planet Interactive Development Materials archive which was preserved by Codebound last year. The main screenshots on the archive show the EMA executable in action for Kong, showing it working and on what seems to be a Windows 98 build. There are also accompanying files with the executable.
So was it a case of missing files or needing to run on an older OS? We tried running within a virtual Windows 98 build via both PCEM and VirtualBox, but all gave blank windows as with Windows 11. Then we looked at the development materials archive and found executables there, including one with files similar to the screenshot. All gave a blank screen as well.
It seems that perhaps a particular version of Direct-X or another set of system files need to be present for the executables to run. Sadly we’ve ran out of time to investigate further, so we are adding everything we have here for anyone who wishes to take a further look. The likes of Casper, Cube, Kong have different build dates compared to the development materials archive.
Action Man is completely new. The only game that seems to exist is this one from 2004, which seems quite late. Was this perhaps a completely different and abandoned Action Man game? There are also a set of tools present, which were also in the Planet Interactive Development archive – we’ve included them just in case there are any differences.
If anyone can figure out how to get any of the executables running, please let us know. However, we found that you can unzip the executables to leave a set of object files. We’re wondering if there might even be a way of extracting out a ROM file to use within a GBA emulator?
Over time, we’ll try and split these up into separate entries.
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