Playing GBC and early GBA games on a backlit screen looks... wrong. Am I alone?

Yup. The AGS-101 has a screen similar to the DS Lite, which while impressive for the time (74% of the sRGB colour gamut is higher than the early generations of smartphones and iPad models) was clearly way too much for earlier games which were designed for older displays with different colour profiles.

I noticed some later games, made with GB Player support in mind, have colour profiles to support other types of displays, for example Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has four different colour profiles to choose from in the main menu.


Some extra info crossposted from the GB thread:

Been reading into the oversaturation of the AGS-101 display (and by extension, the DS Lite display) and it reminds me a lot of the overrated OLED Vita display which oversaturated colours compared with what the monitors the artists would have been working with. Intentionally muted colours often turned overly vivid (or neon as was the case with green) and I remember it being a annoyance with that display. It appears to be the same deal here:

Source.

I played some Wario Land 4 on my Game Boy Micro, N3DS XL (I thought maybe the screen dimming would compensate) and DS Lite and only the Game Boy Micro didn’t turn the sunset a bright yellow - it was orange there. The DS Lite had a colour gamut of about 73% of sRGB according to the experts at DisplayMate, which was super high for 2006, and would explain the oversaturation given what Nintendo R&D would target back in 2000/2001 for WL4.

I also saw this comparison over at the shmups forum, haven’t played CastleVania HoD before so it’s a surprise to me how different it looks:

Wario Land 4 photos: Micro, DS Lite, N3DS XL

Out of all these backlit models, the GB Micro gets closest to what was intended by the developers.


Golden Sun also looks funky on newer displays: Didn't realize the AGS101 color saturation was this bad... - Album on Imgur