Slap some analogs on that baby, some curved stacked L2/R2 button, bigger D-pad, mini-HDMI output, function button, and volume buttons instead of wheel, then we talking.

>>10909680
the lack of X/Y actually contributed to making games more unique though. but the others didn't so sure there.

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>>10909680
Your wish is my command.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1n49MtRZT0

>>10909693
based
>>10909680
GBA sound is fine

I'm not a hardware expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the sound chip itself is fine, it's the speaker that's the limiting factor. Sound palettes had to be limited and songs had to be mastered in strange ways for it to sound remotely okay coming out of that thing.

Otherwise, yeah, I agree.

>>10909680
Agreed, but it's remarkable how well the GBA turned out without 2/3 of those things. I say 2/3 because the unlit screen on the original model was horrible.
>>10909697
Nah, they just hindered the system's possibilities.

Nintendo were too cheap for that shit, homie. I mean, originally the thing was supposed to have only 32k of RAM until they saw the specs for the PSP and decided to give it a more generous 256k.

>>10909737
>GBA sound is fine
Maybe if you're deaf.
>>10909750
Source on that?

>>10909743
It sounds pretty cool if you plug a set of desktop PC speakers with a subwoofer into the headphone jack. I've done it before and the boosted bass is kickass.

>>10909756
I guess I'm deaf.
https://youtu.be/lcs4cPH9x50?si=ZBB9uUD_UMza5e3X
https://youtu.be/8ENmchUb-Ng?si=T5PXBYyCUbnLW7KI
https://youtu.be/VAOONgvVGAM?si=Auxe_azT6RNdYe27

>>10909789
I stand corrected. But if the GBA was capable of producing good music, then why did most games sound lo-fi and tinny?

>>10909740
Most good games let you play without it or it was minimally used.
>>10909840
A lot of lazy ports probably.

>>10909743

I think you are probably wrong. Why would there need to be a lot of weird fizzing and popping in the samples for them to sound GOOD coming out of weak speakers? Music that's designed for crappy speakers shouldn't sound all staticky when played through nice headphones. Surely allowing in that kind of extra noise doesn't help with anything except possibly by reducing the computing resources required to produce the sound (which presumably was the goal).

I mean, the Game Boy has less and weaker sound hardware than the GBA, and it sounds fine. Limited in instrumentation, yes, but perfectly fine. Is that because the Game Boy has better speakers??

>>10909680
I am fine with Nintendo NOT bottlenecking it with a shitty screen so that there's no need of bleaching out all of the games and they ALL would have looked good.

Like seriously the only reason CotM looked so fuxking dark its because the screen they used for model1 is really that fucking murky and dark.

>>10909680
All it needed was the backlight and a battery door that didnt snap into pieces when you looked at it

No one else gives a fuck about it only having one speaker? Really? What the fuck?

>>10910695
If you're interested in sound quality and listening to it, you should just wear headphones. I'd rather the development cost go into something that'll improve the system itself.

>>10909743
The GBA handled audio on the cpu. The audio samples were low quality because it's what the cpu could reasonably handle while also running the rest of the game.
The speaker is irrelevant, but it probably helped mask the audio quality. I never noticed it was bad until I read people complaining about it online.

Afaik the ds works the same way but since the cpu is faster it can crunch higher quality audio. So when people say "the gba needed a better sound chip" really they mean it needs a faster cpu.

>>10909737
>GBA sound is fine

if you mean it sounds fine, you're daft.

>>10909680
>>add an actual sound chip

it doesn't need a sound chip, it needs a DAC that doesnt sound like bit-crushed shit with anything it plays not from the original GB chip.

>>10909761
I have a headset that's actually able to plug into the gameboy advance so I can enjoy the sound with a headset on. kinda funny looking but its nice

GBA was never good. Nintendo was only good with the SNES. Garbage can company.

>>10909840
You can make good sounding BGM for the GBA, but it requires you to build around its quirks. For example, the sappy engine that most gba games use is missing certain instruments, so some developers opted to use their own set of samples/a modified sound engine to get the sounds that they need. That's why the contemporary GBA music ripper doesn't work with every game.
You also have to account for the number of viable tracks/playable sounds at once as well for a GBA game, attempting to play too much at once can cause certain sounds to get snipped.
I'm not privy to the exact design processes that developers used, but I am willing to bet that sound is where most of them didn't give a shit.

>>10909680
>actual sound chip
>perfect
Have you never used the GBA? There's a reason why every emulator for it has filter options.
Fuck, they couldn't even get their logo to not sound like it's half noise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoWTz0jEfAI

>>10909840
you actually don't stand corrected. Them cherry picking questionable examples doesn't negate the whole existence of the sound chip and all the games that exist. They even chose minis which has a lot of static in it's music samples as well but it utilized a bit of reverb and frequency masking in some songs to make it "not as bad", but it was still there in plenty of areas. Watching a longplay of the games (and mind you a lot are recorded with emulators with filtering options that aren't even available on the GBA stock)

I mean even picking Phoenix Wright.
https://youtu.be/aQz0UHAh0zY?feature=shared&t=4693
You can hear the static playing through shit.

The complaint none of us have is that the games themselves had bad musical compositions - the problem is the GBA and the sample rate/compression of the audio and output etc... It's just, not good. Which is a fact, which is why you mentioned it, which is why I mentioned it and backed you up - which is why most people mention it.
It's ironic because the person who commented at you literally HAS to be deaf to not notice it's a real fucking problem and their opinion has nothing on the real reality that we can literally share all the GBA videos and show the system with the poor quality audio of the system - it's there and it's bad period. Cherry picking specific segments that make it harder to tell doesn't cancel out that fact.
Likewise, you should hold your ground on that shit, because you're fucking correct and they aren't. You have an empirical complaint about it and they didn't even address that complaint - they literally just distracted you with non sequitur to pretend that somehow changes the legitimate issue with the GBA.

>>10909840
Also to the point you can see this here in this forum
https://www.resetera.com/threads/was-gba-sound-that-bad-or-is-it-because-youtubers-playing-on-emulator.111501/

Someone linked GBA and DS Megaman audio which uses the same music samples... the GBA one is noticeable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxbEoUAqtAs

On the DS?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnPmafeR3xE


Same song... The audio was busted.

>Here's a quick run-down of the GBA's sound capabilities:
>It includes the original Game Boy's sound hardware. This is why a lot of GBA music might have sounds and/or music we associate with the 8-bit era.
>It has two Direct sound channels where you can play any sounds you want.

>Here are a few potential points of failure for GBA music:
>Some emulators don't get the volume of the Game Boy sound channels mixed correctly with the Direct sound channels, so yes, emulators may make the GBA sound worse because half the music may be drowned out.
>The Direct sound channels only have 8 bits of resolution, which sounds noticeably worse compared to the 16 bit resolution of CD music.
>Cartridge space was limited, so many GBA developers decided to compress their sounds into something granier and lower quality, and you have a recipe for low quality music.

>What might be the biggest point of failure, however, is this: If you want to have high quality MIDI music, which will most likely have many instruments playing on top of one another, you will ideally want many sound channels - one channel for each sound playing. If you have too few sound channels, then you will need to use the CPU to perform high quality sound mixing to mix several sounds down to one channel.

>The GBA only has two Direct wave sound channels, so that meant making high quality MIDI music on the GBA required using lots of precious CPU time. Many GBA developers decided to use low quality sound mixing in order to preserve CPU power for gameplay. This in turn led to the music not sounding as good as it could have.

So it's essentially a combination of hardware and/or laziness.

This is probably the most autistic thread in /vr/ history and that's saying something.

>>10911708
You clearly haven't been in the hardware changes the Saturn needed to be successful threads.

>>10909840
I remember hearing stories a long time ago how Iga had to use the Gameboy Color sound chip to get music in the 2nd Castlevania GBA game, because he had used all the CPU power on graphics and the game itself (As for how it runs on the GBAMicro/DS question I heard it actually has the GBC chipset inside, just no physical way to use the carts)
It probably means that GameBoy Advance games can have good music IF they devote the appropiate amount of CPU cycles to the music. That's why there is so much disparity between games, and most of them had terribly low quality music

>>10911456
The Minish Cap boss theme was definitely better than the other songs they picked. It showed me that GBA music doesn't have to sound bad, though since it was a late release they probably knew the hardware well at that point.

>>10910762
>>10911434
>>10911674
All good explanations, IMO.

>>10911708
Good. Autism is what makes this board great.

>>10910762
>Afaik the ** works the same way
No. That non-retro device has actual hardware sound support with 16 channels. Completely offloads from the CPU.

>>10912102
Yes, even the 3D non-retro device has the Game Boy sound chip in it for the native GBA backwards compatibility(which was only officially used for the 10 ambassador program games). It's crazy the efforts they went to on the HW and SW side for that device's backwards compat.

>>10912498
>Good. Autism is what makes this board great.
Good autism is, not.... this.

>>10909680
It baffles me how goddamn cheap they made this thing when it was in development for so long.

Then they canned it for the DS in a matter of years because it was obviously way too limited.

Still got a bunch of fantastic games including many of the best ever created, but with the amount of SNES ports that Nintendo themselves were trying to do, you'd think SOMEONE would have asked for two more buttons at some point.

I also have to wonder what the hell kind of conditions anyone at the company even played the thing in with the screen they used. It's the absolute hardest to visually parse out of any device I've ever used. The SP was an absolute godsend. Which may well have been their plan the entire time, but it's still completely retarded.

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>>10912548
At least internally at Nintendo they had a GBA emulator, which leaked out in 2020. It even has support for live editing of pokemon pc boxes, which I'm guessing gamefreak requested.

>>10912548
It's too bad the SP didn't have a built in headphone jack. Was it really that hard for Nintendo to include one instead of selling a dongle for the charging port?

>>10909680
>2001
>backlight
yea bro just let me toss a halogen bulb in my handheld

>>10909737
GBA sound only really works in the Battle Network games.
https://youtu.be/eREN5tmJ8PY?si=yOXCNkUv2eXg7JSc

>>10912585
Nintendo themselves released the Game Boy Light years prior only to never offer a similar option for the Color.

>>10909680
My fantasy is that they added 2 face buttons and Capcom continued the X series on the GBA along with the Zero series which would have benefited from extra buttons too.

>>10912548
IIRC it was rushed to the market since Nintendo got scared of the wonderswan. Their original intention was to keep the GB line alive with the Game Boy Color.
It was basically marketed as a new system, it's not the "DSi/New3DS" Upgrade people and even Nintendo want you to believe. But they weren't going to let their handheld monopoly get taken away by a competitor.
Same reason why they rushed the DS when the PSP threatened them. Now GBA only seems like a transitional system like the Saturn. It's surprising the huge library it got in such a short time. Completely killed the wonderswans chances.

>>10911708
>non-autist on an autist board
I shiggy diggy

>>10911674
It’s like how the N64 had no dedicated audio processor, just two digital audio output channels. So developers had to write their own sample-based music playback driver to get any music at all from the digital channels, on top of sound effects if those were sample-based, and schedule CPU time to run all that along with the rest of the game.
Add to that the constraints with cartridge storage for holding samples and the CPU requirements for playing back higher-quality samples and the lack of a hardware low-pass filter on the 8-bit digital audio output (like SNES had) to smooth things out.
It’s not really surprising that a lot of developers mainly opted for GBC sound, especially considering portable dev budgets.

>>10909840
Because a lot of people didn't know how to work around it.

>>10912585
The GameGear and the Lynx were backlit a decade before the GBA.

>>10915487
And both those consoles ate batteries for breakfast because of it.

>>10910668
>and a battery door that didnt snap into pieces when you looked at it
Uhhhh I know it was plastic but wtf are you talking about?

>>10910668
Once I made a comment about how easy it was to break the tab off of the gbc/gba battery covers. Mine broke and I often saw other kids' gameboys without a cover or was held on with tape.
I got a bunch of replies with "nuh uh, MINE is just fine, you were just a shitty kid"

>>10909680
i miss the psp too anon

>>10910762
GBA sound sucks because the software library sucks.

It does lossy compression for the sound, but instead of doing all the processing for the sound and then doing 1 pass on with the lossy compression, it instead does the lossy compression multiple times during the sound processing.

Result is the audio equivalent of an image that's been opened, edited, and saved as a jpeg multiple times: full of noise.

when will emulation fix the audio?

>>10910668
and a steering wheel that doesnt fly off when youre driving

>>10918008
Already has but only on a case-by-case basis with rom hacks like for Final Fantasy 6 Advance. You have to fix it for each individual game.

>>10909680
Real games don't need more than A, B, Start and Select buttons

Aren't there rom hacks now to make the audio mix better?

>>10909789
>pokemon
yup, definitely deaf

What if instead of having L and R buttons, it had X and Y buttons.

>>10920202
select is p useless, 3rd face button would be better, abc like a genesis but arranged triangularly instead of a row