That looks great!
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Really good, just as I remember the GBC looking.
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Man, Nintendo Japanese packaging design is so beautiful.
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Yea those look incredible.
Wowza that looks swell
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I never actually owned a Gameboy Advance SP but always wanted to… I did own a Gameboy Advance and installed (at great personal and emotional cost to myself) an internal aftermarket backlight.
I recently splurged on some Etsy vendor that was selling refurb GBA SP with an IPS screen preinstalled:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/757202367/nintendo-game-boy-advance-gba-sp-ips-mod
In theory here’s the screen difference
Of course there are a zillion great handheld emulator options out there now too, but I wanted to try out the O.G…
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The IPS screen is a big improvement over other backlight options. I have one in a custom made AGB-001:
Got that after using an AGS-101 screen modded AGB-001 for 5 years, and being disappointed with it to the point of just using a non-backlit GBA instead. It’s kind of outrageous how nice the IPS screen feels.
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It’s amazing what the GBC’s sound chip is capable of in the right hands. I was playing Mario Golf and just had to pause to listen to this funky ass baseline. It sounds much better on real hardware though:
Camelot’s sound team was so talented.
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Sakuraba’s output is all over the place but the stuff he did for Camelot around that period was top notch.
Always been fond of the soundtrack to the follow-up, even if it sounds a little too close to Golden Sun sometimes:
So good!
I remember being blown away by the menu music too when I heard it for the first time on my GBA.
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What is he doing to restore those tracks? I need to find these golden sun tracks from an actual gba to hear the difference. I remember really liking the Golden Sun ost but its been a while since i played it.
GBA games use a software synthesizer for music. In Golden Sun’s case, the softsynth is based on and used samples from the Roland SoundCanvas. For those examples the midi data was extracted and modified so it could play back on a real SoundCanvas SC-88 Pro.
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I want this for MiSTer.
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Wow! Was it common for GBA games to use midi tracks? You figure the midi instrument samples have to come out of precious cartridge RAM somewhere…
The Roland SC-55mkII is a classic and that’s what the Doom MIDIs are “supposed” to sound like:
It’s usually more of a custom datatype, but yeah the sound on GBA uses CPU time and RAM space. It wasn’t uncommon for game developers to dump sound quality to get better visuals. It did lead to an interesting variety of sound on the system.
If someone could hack back in higher quality samples for Metroid Zero Mission’s otherwise superb soundtrack, that would be great…
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Yeah, it was always impressive to find GBA games that delivered on both visuals and quality audio. Makes me wonder if that’s why Drill Dozer was 30fps actually, that had some great music for GBA.
Some sound designers/composers made use of the Game Boy PSG in their music too:
Speaking of uncompressed soundtracks, sometimes the compressed samples just sound better. Case in point:
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I really unreasonably like how low-fi the PWM-based 8-bit dac with heavy low-pass-filtering sounds on GBA. Couple that with low quality samples and a cpu-light softsynth and you’ve got such a weird sound you just don’t hear anywhere else.
Even when it’s trying so hard to sound like a Super Nintendo, there’s something really charming about how off it sounds:
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Truly nostalgia talking. But that’s not a bad thing in my book. I share the same nostalgia and love the way these games sound.
This!
Some kind of custom emulator patching the rom would probably be the only feasible way to get that to happen.
Picked up a Daiei Hawks Orange / Black GBC:
Wanted one of these for years. I also have a Midnight Blue GBC, which is deceivingly named as it’s more a deep translucent purple, and a Berry GBC in excellent condition. But sometimes things just call to you. It’s my fav console, plus matching my N64:
(apologies for the lighting, it’s late)
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