It would be shocking if the GBA wasn't substantially more powerful than the SNES. The decade separating them was one of very rapid advancement for the semiconductor field. The number of transistors a dollar bought improved many times over.
Exactly, and the clock frequency limitation of about 3 GHz wasn't reached yet, so newer chips could simply run more cycles without having to add more cores.
Underclocking the system helped the battery life last longer, especially when disposable batteries were required. Even the PSP didn't run at max CPU speed all the time to keep it from eating through juice like the SEGA Nomad.
The snes had a lot of life extensions beyond its core system with the super fx chip and others though. The system lasted longer than it probably would have been expected. However the gba is impressive for its size and battery life. Shows how quickly too arm chips developed, to think, without apple the arm chip might never have left the acorn devices (apple put it in their Newton and acorn at the time hadn't considered spinning arm off as its own entity, now arm dominates the mobile market really and will probably take over the laptop market in some aspects).
@@Gatitasecsii Simply untrue. The rate of process node advancement accelerated considerably during the 90s. The increased pace of processor improvements in the PC sector directly reflects this.
I worked on Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the GBA. It was hard compressing files to fit on it. We threw a lot out and still had barely any room. I think it may be the biggest ROM on the system. I was 1 of only 2 who enjoyed programming for it
@@netten2053 Back then Nintendo gave us a hardware that was basically an emulator with tools to make games on. It's not like we made something then exported it to the GBA. It was made on their gear. It was pointlessly complicated hardware
Well thanks for one of my favorite games on the gba! Just makes me wonder how much you guys really took out and if it was quests, gear.. characters. Did any of it make its way into final fantasy tactics for the DS?
@@kennethabbott7869 Welcome! It's all in there, plus the opening training demo. We just stripped down the quality of music, images, frames of movement to get it all to fit. Basically, just cutting the main file size down to lesser quality. It looks a bit fuzzy to me now. There is a high quality ROM of it at both the Japanese and US offices they could release if they wanted to. I saw it every day during the cycle, so I know it exists. We literally put it in a safe as a hard copy. That was a standard Square practice to ensure the main ROM exists in a physical format along with the removable drives.
@@sagiriizumi8079 Thanks for your response! That actually sounds great , and maybe one day it will release for Switch! Bought it back in the day when it was released. Saved my money when I was a kid doing landscaping. Hot day, burned myself to a crisp lol, Was worth it! Lost that copy , so I am collecting now and plan on getting another copy soon as I can! Great game , love the atmosphere and quests! Still looked great to me on my gameboy player on the GameCube! Addictive game :)
Even for years after the DS was out, plenty of GBA games were still developed and sold. This was partially due to the GBA being incredibly successful in general (and had a larger existing install base), but also because the DS and DS Lite were backwards compatible with GBA games. But this also benefited GBA owners because, you know, new games. I didn't even know the DS existed until after the DS Lite was out!
Man it is worth noting that a lot the impressive 3d GBA games mentioned here (Asterix and Obelix, v rally 3 and drive 3) were made by basically two French dudes, Guillaume Dubail and Fernando Velez. They were absolute mages when it came to pushing the limits of Nintendo handhelds, they were also behind really good looking GBC games, and even behind C.O.P for the DS, which was as the closests the DS got to a full 3D GTA game They were extremely talented, I mean, Guillaume Dubail still is, sadly Fernando passed away in 2016, but Dubail still makes games to this day for the Nintendo switch.
I kneeeeew someone would comment about that before I would. It's good these games are gaining popularity. I usually don't come accros a GBA performance video that doesn't mention at least one VD-dev title. Look up the XXL Prototype, it includes a full song that was part of the beta content of the home console version, in insane quality while the game still runs full speed. It's insane what could have been if the cartridge had the space for more than 1 direct audio song.
Thank you so much for this information, i did not knew about them and I absolutely loved V-Rallye! I’m so sorry to hear that one of those legends already passed on..
Thanks for the glowing review of Goomba Color. I appreciate it. The most interesting part of developing that emulator was in the way the background layers were managed. A GBC background tilemap effectively needs three GBA layers (High Priority tiles and Color 0 tiles), and the GBC can show two layers side by side using the Window feature. Combine that with the emulator's UI and the SGB border layer, you could need to display as many as 8 layers, while the GBA only has 4 layers. So there's a bit of complicated code that manages when each kind of background layers are used.
Thank you for getting me through some really bad times. You're responsible for introducing a brand new generation to Dragon's Lair, by the way. (They sort of liked the graphics and nothing else.) I wish more developers had taken notes from Goomba Color. None of the Gameboy emulators I've seen since, have as many palettes built in.
I only semi-recently discovered Goomba Color when experimenting with a new flashcart, and I was immediately impressed by the featureset and polish of Goomba Color. The custom L menu has some super neat stuff in it, and being able to combine multiple games into one rom (and hotswap between them instantaneously) is genuinely more convenient than most emulators on PC. It is clear that Goomba Color was actually designed to be used, with attention and care put into the user experience. This is uncommon on most emulators, and rare on homebrew emulators. If it weren't for RetroAchievements, I would probably be running Goomba Color even on PC emulators because it's really convenient to wrap all the pokemon games together in one rom :P
This kind of "emulation" is the most interesting. You're translating things between what each set of hardware uses, having to approximate in some cases. It's sort of like the high-level emulation used in some 3D system emulators (the first N64 one I believe).
speaking of emulation, i recently played through xenosaga on my phone with a new ps2 emulator, and was in disbelief that it looked and ran perfectly the whole way through. i also played a little ffx, ffxii, and shadow hearts, and they all seemed to run equally well from what i saw. it's crazy what these emulators can do these days. sadly my phone couldn't quite handle xenosaga 2 or 3. i never got to play 3 and was really excited thinking i'd finally get to. i first discovered the trails series on ppsspp on my phone, playing trails in the sky 1 and 2 and both crossbell games, and they became my favorite games ever. i have nes, snes, gbc, gba, ds, psp, ps1, and n64 emulators on my phone and they all work perfectly. even some dreamcast and gamecube games run really well, and as i already mentioned quite a few ps2 games run great on here. i got a mount for my ps4 controller to mount my phone to it, basically turning it into a portable gaming console that can play all of those games.
I'm pretty sure what the SNES has over the GBA audio-wise has a lot less to do with bit depth and a lot more to do with the fact it actually has dedicated sound hardware... The SNES has 8 sound channels in which it can play whatever samples it can squeeze into memory independently from one-another, whereas the GBA only has two, so if you ever wanna play more than two samples on the system at once you gotta mix them into those two channels in software, and the more samples you try to mix in at once the worse it's going to sound... That's not to say the GBA can't sound good though, or heck, even outdo the SNES in that regard... While the GBA doesn't have sound hardware of its own, it did carry over the GB/C soundchip for backwards compatibility, and you've no doubt heard it being used in the GBA's own games, it was fairly common practise... But the more interesting thing you can do with it is use it in tandem with the GBA's own Direct Audio, if you split the duty of playing back music between the GB/C soundchip and the GBA DA, well, you're not gonna have to mix as much stuff into the DA, and as a result, not only will the quality of the individual samples increase, but the resulting audio will be an unique, and frankly delightful, mix of GB/C beeps and bloops and slightly crunchy samples, which if you ask me, sound right at home together! This can be heard at its best in a lil' game I love called Densetsu no Stafy, but other very good examples are Mario Kart Super Circuit, Puyo Pop, Gyakuten Saiban 3 and Zelda Minish Cap. But this is no advantage over the SNES audio, it's just a neat feature, the REAL advantage the GBA has over the SNES in terms of sound is just a heck of a lot more memory and storage, which it could use to get away with much higher quality raw samples, I've heard it being said time and time again that SNES samples are a bit muffled, well, that's not always the case but it is a fairly common occurrence due to how audio compression is handled on the system, and that's a problem the GBA simply doesn't have, games that actually tried to make good use of the GBA's audio managed to have much clearer-sounding samples, barring the slight hiss that you're inevitably going to get, just give Mother 3, Golden Sun and Iridion 2 a good listen... But that's not all! How about some lyrics? Tales of Phantasia on SNES had an intro cinematic with a song which had full lyrics in it! That's impressive in and of itself! And the song sounds pretty decent, if a bit muffled... But ok, how about the GBA? I'll point you towards Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch - Pichi Pichitto Live Start, which is a rhythm game (and a bloody good one at that) which has, well, an entire rhythm game worth of songs with full lyrics in it... 17 of them to be precise, which isn't a lot by modern rhythm game standards, but is a lot more than you could possibly expect to fit on a SNES cartridge without a frickin' MSU-1 chip... And it sounds pretty decent all things considered, the voices are clearer than what you've heard in Tales of Phantasia, even if not by much, and the rest of the instrumentation is reasonably decent! If anything, it's proof the GBA can pull off an idol rhythm game if it wants to... The real takeaway here isn't that the GBA has better sound than the SNES or anything, or vice-versa, the two systems simply handle sound very differently from one-another, so naturally, if you try to square-peg SNES music into the round hole of GBA audio, it's probably just not gonna come out right... But if you take the GBA's audio as its own thing, and play to its strengths, you can absolutely get wonderful results!
I completely agree. WSC/SNES ports of the first six Final Fantasy games ( except III ) were able to dedicate quite a lot of CPU power to sound, as there usually wasn't a lot of graphics to render or move around, only notable exception being VI. In exchange for a bit of lag in menu selection and casting spells, these games were able to obtain very good music quality, also likely using some of that GB/C soundchip for bass or a wide range of sfx. While VI had to suffer poorer quality, the increased memory space allowed for an actual voice sample to be used at the opera scene instead of what the SNES had, which sounded far more robotic. In fact, a bunch of flagship Nintendo titles ( Mario, Zelda... ) were able to use very convincing voice clips that the SNES really couldn't afford with its memory. The SNES kept it to very short amounts usually, like the "Emergency" in Star Fox, or "Okesuka?" and "I miss you" in Earthbound.
Also, best example I know of doing the opposite and relying mostly on the GB/C soundchip would be for Asterix Bash 'em all ( 2002 ). That game is a 2 in 1, one of them being original and the other a SNES port of Asterix & Obelix ( 1995 ). Alberto Jose Gonzalez composed for all of the aforementionned. As he is extremely capable with Gameboy music ( as he proved on many games on that system with insanely good tracks ), he chose to use the GB/C soundchip as the primary chip responsible for all the melody and bass effects he knew so well how to do. He then tasked the GBA DA to do occasionnal percussions in the songs, and the sound effects, like punches and enemy grunts. The result sounds very pleasing, and the SNES port doesn't sound cheap at all, instead using its own style. It's worth a listen!
Bit depth has surprisingly little to do with the quality of the audio anyway (and I HATE how often chiptune is incorrectly called "8-Bit.") Most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 24 and 12 bit recording, especially without nice equipment. All bit depth really does is determine the MAX amount of dynamic range and MIN noise floor. When it comes to fidelity sample rate is king!
yep,a good example of this is contra 3. the SNES version has a wonderful orchestral/militaristic soundtrack that really gets the blood pumping.the GBA port,however... doesn't.
GBA was a phenomenal portable power house, one that’s well ahead of the SNES. It’s primary relative weakness was sound quality, which on the SNES was exceptional in terms of hardware.
3 of the impressive GBA games showing 3D, V-Rally 3, Driv3r and Asterix XXL were all developed by VD-Dev, an insane duo of a single programmer and a graphic designer, Fernando Velez and Guillaume Dubail, who are known for breaking the boundaries of handheld hardware in their games. Asterix XXL in specific was so impressive in fact, that its pototype found recently played a minute long music track ( which was beta content of the home console version already ), in such quality that i've never believed possible on the system. The typical 8-bit crunch is nowhere to be heard, or might be very faint. The final game could have very well had paired high graphics with high music ( as the prototype shows debug rooms who aren't empty by all means ), however since that track took over half the cartridge's memory, it obviously had to be swapped to songs made out of tiny snippets of samples ( that sound far, far worse sadly ) put together into like 8 songs, made by someone outside VD-dev, Allister Brimble ( different composer from the home console version ). Theorically, it would be possible to have a huge GBA rom on a flashcart play this game with high quality music without much performance impact. Perhaps all the VD-dev games could, as the level of optimisations for those games are simply insane. XXL's engine could have made a very faithful Spyro game, with few drawbacks.
Exactly! And their games usually run in full resolution, while many other 3D GBA games don't. They e.g. use half the vertical and/or horizontal resolution. This makes a huge difference on the already low res GBA screen. VD-dev used some special rendering trick though which was visible in the kind of unique camera distortion it introduced on the screen.
Don't forget their games on Game Boy Color. Most of them have Alberto Jose Gonzalez as composer (Lucky Luke, V-Rally, The Smurfs' Nightmare, Bugs & Lola Bunny Operation Carrot)
@@cube2fox That texture "distortion" you mention is due to the sprite engine (which was used to draw the 3D quads (it used quads instead of triangles)) doing affine transformations (a simpler and faster "short-cut" to transform texture maps onto quads). Many people think that these 3D games for the GBA are all rendered in software by the CPU, but this is not true. The ARM7 @ 14MHz CPU was much too slow to do this... Because the GBA had full transform capabilities for sprites (eg quads with textures), the CPU could use the sprite engine to draw a up to a hundred or so fully transformed, affine textured quads to the screen, making it possible to have those 3D games run at a playable speed... The SEGA saturn used a similar technique, transforming texture mapped "sprites" onto the screen, which is why it only supported quads and not triangles for it's scene geometry.
@@HPPalmtopTube The Saturn didn't have the camera distortion effect though you see e.g. in Asterix and Obelix XXL. Other 3D GBA games not by VD-dev also didn't have this distortion, although they mostly ran much worse.
17:42 GBA doesn't use sample based audio processors, it doesn't have an audio processor at all :D It has the same sound generator channels from the OG GameBoy, as well two PCM channels that let you essentially play back WAV data (so samples, if you want. Or an entire music file in one go!) You have to spend precious CPU time mixing samples in software, which is why a lot of GBA games just use the GameBoy audio as it's less CPU power to handle that The PCM channels have a bit depth of 8-bits, but the actual sound output is 9-bits and you can achieve this by playing back the two PCM channels together and letting the audio circuitry add them to 9-bit output
@@CHICKENmcNUGGIESMydude I'm pretty sure that Xilefian right. Wikipedia lists this to be the case: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance#Technical_specifications And, if you don't trust Wikipedia, here's another source with examples: www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/game-boy-advance/#audio
Now that I'm older, I understand that the GBA was released as a stop-gap, seeing as their previous 32bit handheld project was delayed for a while. A pity it was only a few years on the market, especially compared to the GB/GBC. A ton of games on that system, though, and pretty fun to mess around with. Still loving my Glacier Blue :')
the GBC was the real stop-gap. Nintendo were trying to get a 32-bit handheld to market in the late 90s (project Atlantis), but it didn't come to fruition -- until GBA that is. The reason they put out the DS after only 3 years of GBA was that the PSP was on the horizon and Nintendo needed to compete.
To be more precise on GBA sound quality, the main reason it doesn't sound good isn't about bit depth but the lack of interpolation on sample playback. That makes for a very grainy sound, when you have for example 8khz samples stretched to fit the 32khz output. The SNES used equally bad and even shorter samples, but they sounded better because of the superb gaussian interpolation used (it also muffled them quite a bit). Since GBA processes audio in software, adding interpolation would have been quite taxing on the CPU
Agreed. The low bit-depth of GBA led to noisy sound (e.g. Metroid Fusion's otherwise great soundtrack). But the lack of a DSP, and sound taking CPU away from the game, lead to poor audio engines; graphics are generally prioritized over sound. The SNES resampled things using a multi-point convolution. Doing that in software would be time-consuming, as convolution is (lots of multiplies for every sample). Finally, since the unit was portable and mostly heard via its built-in tiny speaker, in an environment that may be noisy, SNES-quality audio would be somewhat of a waste.
You can’t imagine how long I’ve waited to see a video from you with this title. The GBA is my favorite game system, and I’m happy to see it get the appreciation it rightfully deserves
psp emulates the ps1 natively and emulates gba and gb flawlessly, it emulates some n64 games well (without sound) it doesn't do well with many snes games, many Ps2 games were ported to the psp, that is the only way you will play ps2 games without a ps2, an original ps3 or a darn good pc. The DS will run DS games all the way back to old gameboy and can emulate the old nintendo line if it wasnt ported. Nintendo ported any n64 games with resale value to the ds with some twists. The DS had touch screen and two screens which is a turd to port, or play emulated. Basically Dreamcast Ps2 and N64 are turds to emulate properly without a lot of power. Ps3 on has been multiplatform as far as games except for a few proprietary titles such as Halo.
@@Benzona I wouldn't go that far. My Dell laptop that I bought in Nov. 2011 could run a PS2 emulator but not at full frame rate. It came with a lousy 4 GB of RAM & eventually I was barely able to afford an upgrade by replacing one of the two 2 GB memory sticks with a 4 GB one, only giving me a total of 6 GB, and even that was barely enough to run a game. It also came with a shitty Intel HD graphics card that didn't support OpenGL very well & had to rely on DirectX11 which isn't the best choice either. Then I bought a Lenovo laptop made in 2013 but had much more RAM (16 GB), better GPU & more cores, and only then can I run PS2 games smoothly.
@@Animebryan2 I also have a Dell laptop, but this time from 2012. Exactly the same specs as you said, can't run PS2. I wish you good luck with your new laptop
My favourite channel :D great to see your subs rising! from the perspective of a high level programmer? your breakdown of techniques as pseudo algorithms and processes rather than as code? is what I appreciate the most - it allows me to understand the points you're making and the capabilities of the device without having to keep track of registers in my head!
Yeah due to there not being very much competition and Pokemon revitalizing Gameboy sales Nintendo didn't bother pushing out any successors for a long time
Honestly the rest of the tech in creating mobile devices had to catch up beforehand to make it worthwhile, I doubt lots of minor upgrades would have helped the game boy stay dominant, it might even have detracted from it. Even the GBA was flawed with the GBA SP fixing them with rechargeable battery, backlight and clamshell design to protect screen scratches, just a less comfortable design and no headphone socket(!).
Even if the gba sound quality was inferior to the snes sounds, you cannot lie that some games really took advantage of those intense gba sounds and made some bopping osts that really fit in that form.
20:18 That's *flat-shading* _not_ Gouraud shading. Gouraud shading linearly interpolates intensity at each triangle point to smooth the shading across it, allowing the shading to smoothly range across the polygon surface. Flat-shading just adjusts the _entire surface_ as the same color, the intensity of which corresponding to how much it faces the light source. I could go into vast detail on the mathematics of this, but hopefully that explanation suffices. - Game programmer
Genuine wow at Open Lara's performance. Only wow game I'd chuck in the mix though it's more like an Amiga tech demo is Iridion II. The CG rendered graphics look incredible to this day. Genuinely looks like a fully 3D rendered game despite all being sprites and the like.
I bought a used GBA last week. At home I have my modded SNES classic and for travelling I play on the GBA, I'm happy with this two great systems. It's a good handheld, but the two missing buttons make a huge difference!
I used to have an advance sp ags101, but nowadays use my modded 2dsxl for playing that system. Nice for savestates as well... There's a nice homebrew version of 'castle master' on the Gba....try that out, I can recommend....
I've owned just about every major handheld released but I've been completely converted by a recent Anbernic retro-emulator. Beautiful screen, virtually flawless emulation and no need to worry about taking the correct cartridges with me.
Great video about a handheld that doesn't get enough love! I have one small quibble though: DOOM did NOT use a Raycasting engine--that would be its precursor, Wolfenstein 3D. DOOM used a different method called BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) to achieve its faux-3D look.
I seem to remember reading a really long time ago that the floors and ceilings in Doom are are drawn one horizontal line at a time (because that makes the math simpler) while the walls are drawn one vertical line at a time, which would be hard to do with pure ray casting.
What i loved about the gba was that its basically a snes portable. Though the snes ports suck in comparisson to the real deal. Also the gba is basically a 32bit console pretending to be a 16bit console. Snes is the best console ever made, gba is up there.
Y'all be smokin' some whack crack! PS2 was the best console ever made. It was backwards compatible with PS1 games, had an extensive library of games on its own (including a lot of good JRPGs), and it could play both music CDs & DVDs, all in one system!
The Virtual Boy was an interesting stepping stone between GB and GBA. It had a 20 MHz 32-bit RISC processor that could do some kinds of rotation. The Wario Land was great for it.
@blargg I believe that kind of pseudo 3D rotation seen on the SNES , Virtual boy & GBA is technically called affine transformation Nintendo just called in mode 7
Affine transformation is a type of geometric transformation. Mode 7 is a graphics mode on the SNES that can apply affine transformations to a background layer. Affine transformation alone isn’t enough to create the 3D effects seen in SNES games.
@ 15:20 It definitely has happened. Steam Deck's a handheld and it emulates the Switch. Yes I do realise that statement is probably an underhanded nod to this and how Nintendo handled the uploaded footage of the said emulation.
20:18 That's not Gouraud shading. That's actually flat shading. Gouraud shading is shading that's smoothened in order to hide the boundaries of each polygon. The shading in this demo is not at all smooth like Gouraud shading is.
Ive been saying this for years and people called me crazy. People judge the GBA sound capabilities based on comparing the soundtracks of Super NES to GBA ports alone, but the music composed from the ground up for GBA often matches or surpasses the Super NES.
4:50 I think it also is because of resolution. The GBA was 160p compared to the 220p of the SNES. That low 160p resolution was consistently the biggest shortcoming of the GBA. It made it challenging sometimes to really take full advantage of it's power.
I loved the GBA SP, but its biggest downside which made SNES ports inferior to play(some unplayable) was the only 2 face buttons. I really wish it had 4. Its my favorite console, and the only handheld that was a daily carry for me, but it really needed that
Not every game would suit that play style though. Metroid Fusion for example use the shoulder buttons for aiming, assigning L and R to the Y and X buttons makes aiming feel awkward when you also had to use B and A along with it.
It's funny because while I do hear this criticism a lot, i've actually only played one single GBA game that I feel suffers from lack of buttons. Kingdom Hearts COM. It could have used a dedicated button for the dodge and another for stocking cards. Instead, dodging is handled by double tapping the dpad. It works but feels clunky. Stocking is L+R. Again it works, but i'd occasionally press one too soon and it would scroll through the deck instead and messes me up. I've used emulators that have allowed you to map an L+R press to a separate single button and it functions beautifully (the PS2 remake also mapped it to triangle I believe, and also used the traditional square to dodge). I don't play fighting games, but i'm sure they are also impacted by the lack of buttons as well (the few that are on the system anyway). But other than those, I can't actually think of any other games that suffered from having only two face buttons. The two Metroid games actually control better than Super IMO, they streamlined and simplified the way weapons work (there's even a popular rom hack for Super that implements the GBA controls). For Megaman, I vastly prefer having the dash mechanic mapped to a shoulder button instead of one of the face buttons. Same goes for the spinjump in Mario World, and especially the egg aiming in Yoshi's Island. The teamup move in the DKC games also worked well with the shoulder buttons. I do prefer playing the SNES versions over their GBA ports for other reasons, but the control alterations almost always worked extremely well. I've even occasionally remapped the SNES version controls when possible to work like they did on GBA. The shoulder buttons were often underutilized on many SNES games, which is a shame.
@@drowningin The GBA version of Phantasia sucks ass for sure. But the lack of buttons wasn't among my issues with it. It feels sluggis and there's tons of slowdown, the game's visuals and music are also terrible. It's not even a direct "port" of the SNES version either, the battle system was reworked to function like the PS1 version. It plays very differently. It could have been a good version had the other issues been fixed.
I was actually wondering about this just this morning because I was testing out some GBA Games and I noticed that they do look impressive even now. I didn’t realize how extensive the game library was for this portable either there’s so many games that I need to get around for checking out for the first time from GBA
Also i actually like the low sound quality, it gives the games charm GBA games also have OST that absolutely slaps Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga and Pokemon RSE are the pinnacle of GBA ost
Glad you mentioned the FANTASTIC Doom source port on GBA. It's the most impressive port I've ever seen. If you haven't played it yet...you really should! Great video Sharopolis!
3:12 Minor correction about the GBA's "bitness." What is referred to here, is the two instruction sets. The regular 32bit ARM mode and the "compressed" 16bit thumb mode. Both could be used in the same program, but switching between them was not free, I believe. The important thing to note and the core of this correction is, that thumb mode does not change anything about the bitness of the CPU or of anything else. It is still a 32bit CPU, albeit with some restrictions that enable the smaller operation coding. The reason thumb mode was used so much, is that the program is executed directly from the cartridge, which is accessed via a 16bit bus. That means each ARM mode instruction requires two reads, thus making the CPU wait for twice as long and slowing it down considerably. Despite that ARM mode was sometimes used for important and complex routines that were first copied to the much faster internal work RAM (external work RAM was much bigger at 256k than the internal 32k one and a good bit faster than cartridges, but was also limited by a 16bit bus). You might have needed more thumb instructions for certain things, but at least the CPU was doing useful work with each instruction read. Take it with a grain of salt, it's been some 20 years since I last programmed the GBA. I did however work on the NDS for years after that and it also used the same CPU as a coprocessor to the somewhat slightly more modern main CPU. (I did confirm it all, to make sure there weren't any big mistakes due to misremembering.) I really enjoyed programming the GBA and later the NDS. They both still were the sort of system that a single programmer with enough experience could keep in their head, with all the features, modes and limitations (at least the most common bits).
Another 3D GBA game that I like to bring up when mentioning impressive ones is Top Gear Rally. It doesn't look quite as good as V-Rally 3 overall I'd say but it runs perhaps a bit more consistently because it doesn't try to throw as much impressive stuff on the screen. V-Rally 3 is more impressive for sure but for a racing game, framerate is crucial and most 3D racing games on GBA tended to run really bad. Tomb Raider GBA is perhaps the most impressive development to ever grace the system though. When I first saw it, pretty sure my jaw dropped, so sad we never got to see back in the day as a commercial release, i would have bought that!
Too Gear Rally does run smoother, but I do think VD-Dev should still be commended for the performance in their games. All of their typically manage a consistent 20fps which is pretty good by the standards of 3D GBA games. I know there's far simpler 3D games on the system that run much worse than that.
I think, more than anything, is that they just didn't care enough and just wanted to get such old games out for sale rather than do them right.. There is a long history of old games being released for later consoles in poor states. Sonic 1 on GBA is a good example of that. And there have been many official emulation collections over the years that have had major issues that were deemed fit for release. The big issue with NES games on GBA is the screen resolution.
GBA was a nice system, Aria of Sorrow being a huge highpoint for me even though I played it maybe 10 years after it came out? DS vs N64 seems natural next
The reason the GBA was superseded so quickly was because of the PSP, this forced Nintendo to release another console with new features to compete with the PSP, and that was the Nintendo DS (Yamauchi said he wanted a console with 2 screens). Look at the first presentation of Nintendo DS, Reggie held the 2 covers with a lot of pressure so that they did not fall to the ground with his hand, since he had a sketch of the design of the future console created in a short time to present it at E3.
@@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung i hope it can play games like God Of War, GTA Stories, Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII
@@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung CPU PSP's 333mhz vs Dreamcast's 200mhz. RAM PSP's 64mb vs Dreamcast's 16mb, Specifically Raw power PSP's 2.6Gigaflop vs Dreamcast's 2.1Gigaflop. The Dreamcast surpass PSP GPUs 200mhz on dreamcast vs 100mhz psp and resolution 640x480 on dreamcast vs 480x272 on psp and VRAM 8mb on dreamcast vs 2mb on PSP. As i say, PSP is just "slightly" more powerful than Dreamcast, it can render graphics so much better than Dreamcast but in specs aspect, both almost close
Watching your videos gives me such a sense of nostalgia. Your accent reminds me so much of old Video Game TV shows and reviews I used to watch as a kid. im so glad someone with your accent has taken up the challenge of providing reviews of video game stuff! Been subscribed a while, but wanted to say thanks!
9:06 There was actually a game for the GBA called "Star x" that plays just like Star Fox and it even was one of the first titles to come out for the handheld. Pretty decent game playwise.
Normally when someone I'm subscribed to uploads, I'll wait a while, then skim the video and leave halfway through. When you upload, I stop what I'm doing and watch the entire thing every time. I never get bored of this stuff.
The Archimedes showed the power of ARM chips, but maybe the GBA was ARMs first hit system, which made people sit up and take notice? Not sure that's true, was ARM used for something else popular before GBA?
ARM chips were also used in Pocket PCs, which depending on model could be decent emulation devices at the time. I was able to play NES, some SNES and Genesis on the device.
I still remember the first time I saw that Doom had come out on the GBA. I made a split second decision right then and there that I could pay my phone bill late. This was way more important. And it was a wise decision--being able to play Doom on the bus to and from work was amazing.
I really wish the gba had the full 4 face buttons. It's such an amazing system and thinking about the extra possibilities with the full set of face buttons makes my brain tingle
GBA - my first handheld console (not counting original GB borrowed from my neighbour). So many great games. Wonderful memories :). I didn't know that it was so much more powerful than SNES. Very informative and interesting video.
GBA cartridges were too small to have any extra processing chips put inside so I don't think they could have made an equivalent. GBA cartridges were barely big enough to contain the memory chip for the rom file plus the game save chip.
@@pauldavis5665 They could have just made the carts bigger, some games were bigger than the slot on the system anyway for specialized purposes, so why couldn't the same be done for additional processing capability?
When I was but a wee lad I totally thought of the GBA as a portable SNES and also my first soiree into the Metroid franchise was for GBA and those games looked amazing even when compared to Super Metroid, also I don't have to be stuck in my (or more likely someone else's) living room to experience that level of quality.
The SNES’s advantage in the Audio department is actually BIGGER than you made it out to be. The SNES had EIGHT 32kHz/16-bit PCM sound channels, while the GBA had TWO 32kHz/8-bit PCM channels + The original Gameboy’s PSG which added 2 Pulse Channels, a Noise Channel, and a 4-bit Wavetable channel-and again, without a dedicated audio processor like the SNES to take load off the CPU. Needless to say, this makes it much more difficult to adapt SNES soundtracks to the GBA, as you’d have to pick which two sound channels to “just” crunch down to 8-bit, which one to jam into 4-bit, which to REPLACE with pulse and noise (in practice, often the SFX, with the 2 PCMs and WAV channel reserved for BGM), and which to drop entirely. I’ve seen tricks in the music tracker scene where folks use the 4-bit wavetable and superposition to create multiple “phantom” channels, but again, that’s a huge tradeoff. Converting Music from SNES to GBA was not at all straightforward, and while it can do a decent job with smart use of the tools available, anything that was using the full capability of the SNES for its soundtrack will need to be severely trimmed to run on the GBA.
Remember this was one of those rare times being able to get this a little after launch with Tony Hawks Pro Skater and it impressing everyone. The audio limitations make sense, as you can see with the Castlevania games starting with Circle of the Moon having a larger focus on audio vs the sequel going for visual instead.
The GP32 is, in many ways a much more powerful machine from the same era. I think it came out a bit before the GBA. It is also quite similar in other ways like the look of the machine. It can play Doom much better and for some games, it can emulate a GBA.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 OK. It is still better by a long way in every way. There are ton of emulators that run at full speed too. The screen is MUCH better. Maybe the GBA has better battery life. I'm not sure. I've always run mine on rechargeables. (I have a GP32 non-lit version and a GP2X) I bought both back when they were new.
@@tarstarkusz From what I've seen in the community, the GP32's battery life wasn't the only issue. Complaints about hardware errors and data corruption are worryingly common, even back in the day. And the official library can't begin to compete. But yeah, so long as it worked for you, there was no comparison in terms of raw power.
Nintendo really got smart with handheld systems starting with the GBA. Instead of falling into the trap like Sega and Sony did of trying to get current gen graphics on a mobile platform, they simply took the previous gen and refined it. This allows them to keep cost down and greatly expand the player base.
Low Spec Gamer had a nice vid on Why the DMG1 was as it was. Basically, (besides the usual N shenanigans...) N chose to go for price, stable tech, battery life, and mass market vs the cutting-edge competition. Just like Wii. It was a system that everyone could own, not just the wealthy. Then they packaged it with Tetris... th-cam.com/video/9Ki-kH751_8/w-d-xo.html
the colour pallet issues could've been alleviated if we would've gotten backlit screens to begin with. does not make emulation the nicest experience for the affected games lol
The thing is the gba has an awesome game library, i had the psp too and I always ended up playing the GBA instead, common bateries made it so much more convinient too.
The GBA SP was the only video game system I had for years. I got it for Christmas 2003 when I was 8 years old. It's still my favorite handheld system and always will be. I admit that nostalgia plays a part in that but I still play it to this day. Still take it on trips. It's just the perfect portable system to me forever.
SNES games are still some of the best of all time and GBA able to play good ports of them helped keep those games in everyone's minds and introduce to new generation of kids, as well as appreciation of 2D art which was very unfashionable when 3D games became the industry obsession.
For a long time I never realized the GBA was capable of 3D, since every game I got for it back in the day was 2D or pre-rendered graphics. So it blew my mind years later when I saw footage of games running with fully 3D environments, I never thought I'd see the GBA get a category on Models Resource. I had always viewed the DS as Nintendo's first 3D handheld. But now people are pushing this thing to its absolute limit, there's even a Super Mario 64 homebrew remake being made. I'm honestly very interested in seeing where that goes and I'd love to be able to play it some day.
Yeah the GBA is powered by an 16.78 MHz ARM 32-bit microprocessor that could run circles around the Snes's Ricoh 5A22 16-bit processor running at 3.5 MHz. Still, this is a fantastic video. Wait a minute...the Steam Deck can emulate a Nintendo Switch.
Gba was more powerful but didn't have 89.99pounds price games like snes with extra graphics cips built in cartrige rendering most of the graphics.Was kind of clever cheat from snes
I recently just got back I to retro gaming after MANY years. I was a child thru the beginning of it all and by the time the GBA had come out I was a teenager and worried about the latest disk system. When was recently looking into playin the old games I grew up playing,before I ended up with a rg351p, I was blown away by the specs of the GBA and couldn't help but think how amazing it would have been in the mid 90's instead of the early 2000's
90s handheld technology was simply too bad, any improvements would have been very incremental. Probably the biggest is simply clarity of the screen, which showed in the GB Pocket and Light. The sega game gear has beautiful screen and backlight but only few hours of battery and weighed a ton with 6 AA batteries.
The gba was almost perfect. The sound was so abysmal and a step backwards from the snes version. It made rpgs much less impactful because the gorgeous music was butchered by the low quality sound
The GBA was actually capable of pretty great sound, but it was not 1:1 compatible with SNES music. Trying to port pre-existing compositions that were designed around the sound capabilities of the SNES just isn't really going to work well on the GBA, because you're basically trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Plenty of games - even genuinely good ones - did not prioritize the sound quality, partially because of the lack of dedicated sound hardware, but the GBA could make genuinely beautiful sounds if the composition takes advantage of its unique strengths. There were just slightly too many reasons for most developers to half-ass the sound in favor of other things, so a large portion of the GBA's library does sound like shit. But comparing it directly to the SNES isn't really fair because of the inherent differences between how the two generate sound.
@@DELTARYZ Yup. Some good titles include Golden Sun, Mother 3 and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Red Rescue Team. They proved you can actually be nostalgic to how the GBA sounds specifically ( come to think of it, there truly is no other system on earth that ever ressembled that, right? )
@@DELTARYZ I agree, GBA sound essentially relied on how skilled the programmers were to pull things out, and how many CPU they wanted (or they could) spend. The best examples normally come from actual GBA games and not the cheaply-done ports. Have you ever heard the soundtracks of any game composed by Naofumi Tsuruyama & Takuya Hanaoka? (e. Little Buster Q, Zero Tours, Zoids Saga I & II, Super Robot Wars Original Generation I & II, etc.) Those composers really got the hang of GBA sound, and managed to get the best of both worlds (PCM & PSG). The only downside of their style is that all the PCM is mono, so the only thing capable of panning are the GB sound channels. I recommend you check them out, there's a really good channel here on TH-cam that uploaded a great majority of the soundtracks I mentioned.
Recently I got out my old Gameboy stuff and I've been enjoying some of my favorites. I'm happy to hear that the GBA can be made to emulate the Gameboy color, since I've been favoring the Gameboy micro, because it's the only Gameboy I have with a lighted screen and rechargeable battery. I missed out on the GBA SP.
8:35 Doom doesn't use ray-casting, it's its own thing entirely Interestingly, ray-casting is less efficient than Doom style rendering, which is why Wolfenstein 3D on SNES doesn't use ray-casting, uses something closer to Doom. I've written a few ray-casting engines for GBA, it's definitely not the fastest technique (true for both GBA, and the original 286 Wolf3D was made for)
@@legacyoftheancientsC64c there isn't a name for it and to describe it will take a LONG time. The simple explanation is: it uses the angle between vertices of walls and the player's facing direction to check where in 1D space a vertex is projected in a look up table, then calculates the distance of the vertices to the camera plane, then fills the gaps between the two vertices (accounting for a wall "height" meta data) So it's 2D->1D projection. Myself and a few others describe this as a 1D span raster engine, but that's not a super descriptive term. "Doom-like" is the best description.
@@CHICKENmcNUGGIESMydude There's actually a short video that does a good job explaining this and how it's different than raycasting. Here it is: th-cam.com/video/zb6Eo1D6VW8/w-d-xo.html
Great video and this is stuff I've pushed people to look into for years. V-Rally there for instance the polygonal surface, the way it renders, the way it specifically warps along the edges, it renders like Sega Rally Saturn does, handles similarly in many ways but is mindblowing a GBA does that. V3D that was its early game, Asterix in this video here is the last entry along with Driver3. While you highlighted V3D only, why not the equally if not slightly more impressive european Blue Roses engine? Wing Commander Prophecy was its highpoint, the full PC game is there, every stage, every event, just not the campy terrible CGI between stages junk reduced to text boxes. The engine rendered all the explosions, shield burn, weapons fire, many ships even capital sized or being in one to launch and land, the engine also did the impressive Smashing Drive. Also curious since you covered private emulation projects, why not what loopy/flubba did?? PocketNES and Goomba/Color were amazing, but really something odd that stood out was PCE Advance (PC Engine/TG16) this one ran games from 80-100% speed, largely full which is a lot given but it also runs full on CD games in ISO format so you could have Dracula X and Ys 1+2 in your pocket way way before the PSP conversion of DX.
The warps along the edges you mention are due to the textures being mapped with affine-transformations, a "schort-cut" for faster texture mapping, but you get those distortions at high angles... (BTW: the PS1 and saturn did this too, but the N64 didn't) Many people think that these 3D games for the GBA are all rendered in software by the CPU, but this is not true. The ARM7 @ 14MHz CPU was much too slow to do this... Because the GBA had full transform capabilities for sprites (eg quads with textures), the CPU could use the sprite engine to draw a up to a hundred or so fully transformed, affine textured quads to the screen, making it possible to have those 3D games run at a playable speed... The SEGA saturn used a similar technique, transforming texture mapped "sprites" onto the screen, which is why it only supported quads and not triangles for it's scene geometry.
Good choice. Yeah I skipped from the GB pocket to the DS lite. Nothing in between seemed worth it. The GBA SP almost seemed worth it, but it was super cramped, only two face buttons, and no headphone jack.. No thanks. I want a backlight, not an insult.
It was interesting how back then they created 2 tracks, perhaps inadvertently where the TV game would have its run then the portable game would be very similar and they could re-release the same games all over again.
I love my GBA and GB Micro, but the hardware has one major shortcoming in my opinion: The sound. The GBA SOC has a PSG to make gameboy-like sounds, which is fine, but the 'advanced' sound is just a pair of 8-bit DAC's: No sound coprocessor, no DSP, just a pair of DACs, under direct control of the CPU. I don't think it even has a DMA.. So sampled sound requires direct CPU intervention, and a lot of it, to generate music, and its still only 8-bits per channel. Even the old Amiga 500 does a better job: it has twice as many 8-bit channels, with DMA support.
To be fair, the Amiga line always had a reputation for being great for creative (particularly audio/music) purposes. I don't think most people would produce an album on a GBA :P Regardless, the GBA sound hardware is definitely a shortcoming, but it was still capable of genuinely beautiful and rich sound if you play to its unique strengths and work within its limitations trying to port SNES music 1:1 is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole
It does have DMA for the 2 PCM channels, but they can only play one-shot samples (no looping). The channels also have a selectable 50% volume setting and panning flags. The panning in particular allows a mono stream to play through one of them and makes the other one free for higher-quality samples.
10 years is an eternity in computer hardware development. Even more so in the 90s, when Moore's law of the doubling of computer power ever 2 years was even more than apparent.
![ทุกครั้งที่หลับตา (Lucid Dream) - AYLA's [ Official MV ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4i1OBAQyv58/mqdefault.jpg)
It would be shocking if the GBA wasn't substantially more powerful than the SNES. The decade separating them was one of very rapid advancement for the semiconductor field. The number of transistors a dollar bought improved many times over.
Exactly, and the clock frequency limitation of about 3 GHz wasn't reached yet, so newer chips could simply run more cycles without having to add more cores.
Underclocking the system helped the battery life last longer, especially when disposable batteries were required. Even the PSP didn't run at max CPU speed all the time to keep it from eating through juice like the SEGA Nomad.
The snes had a lot of life extensions beyond its core system with the super fx chip and others though. The system lasted longer than it probably would have been expected.
However the gba is impressive for its size and battery life. Shows how quickly too arm chips developed, to think, without apple the arm chip might never have left the acorn devices (apple put it in their Newton and acorn at the time hadn't considered spinning arm off as its own entity, now arm dominates the mobile market really and will probably take over the laptop market in some aspects).
You can say that of literally any period of time ever. Right now almost any phone can run better than the PS4...
@@Gatitasecsii Simply untrue. The rate of process node advancement accelerated considerably during the 90s. The increased pace of processor improvements in the PC sector directly reflects this.
I worked on Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for the GBA. It was hard compressing files to fit on it. We threw a lot out and still had barely any room. I think it may be the biggest ROM on the system. I was 1 of only 2 who enjoyed programming for it
wow , any video or something that you made on how to programming on gba
@@netten2053 Back then Nintendo gave us a hardware that was basically an emulator with tools to make games on. It's not like we made something then exported it to the GBA. It was made on their gear. It was pointlessly complicated hardware
Well thanks for one of my favorite games on the gba!
Just makes me wonder how much you guys really took out and if it was quests, gear.. characters. Did any of it make its way into final fantasy tactics for the DS?
@@kennethabbott7869 Welcome! It's all in there, plus the opening training demo. We just stripped down the quality of music, images, frames of movement to get it all to fit. Basically, just cutting the main file size down to lesser quality. It looks a bit fuzzy to me now. There is a high quality ROM of it at both the Japanese and US offices they could release if they wanted to. I saw it every day during the cycle, so I know it exists. We literally put it in a safe as a hard copy. That was a standard Square practice to ensure the main ROM exists in a physical format along with the removable drives.
@@sagiriizumi8079 Thanks for your response! That actually sounds great , and maybe one day it will release for Switch! Bought it back in the day when it was released. Saved my money when I was a kid doing landscaping. Hot day, burned myself to a crisp lol, Was worth it! Lost that copy , so I am collecting now and plan on getting another copy soon as I can! Great game , love the atmosphere and quests! Still looked great to me on my gameboy player on the GameCube! Addictive game :)
It's hard to believe the GBA was only Nintendo's main hand healed for 3 years. It was definitely my main system for way longer than that.
Even for years after the DS was out, plenty of GBA games were still developed and sold. This was partially due to the GBA being incredibly successful in general (and had a larger existing install base), but also because the DS and DS Lite were backwards compatible with GBA games. But this also benefited GBA owners because, you know, new games.
I didn't even know the DS existed until after the DS Lite was out!
It still is my main system 😂
I do wondered if the psp never came out. Would had the ds came out that early? I think the ds came out due to psp being announced.
@@ChristianJDY This 100% true. The release of the DS was Nintendo's response to the PSP.
Hand healed lol
Man it is worth noting that a lot the impressive 3d GBA games mentioned here (Asterix and Obelix, v rally 3 and drive 3) were made by basically two French dudes, Guillaume Dubail and Fernando Velez.
They were absolute mages when it came to pushing the limits of Nintendo handhelds, they were also behind really good looking GBC games, and even behind C.O.P for the DS, which was as the closests the DS got to a full 3D GTA game
They were extremely talented, I mean, Guillaume Dubail still is, sadly Fernando passed away in 2016, but Dubail still makes games to this day for the Nintendo switch.
I kneeeeew someone would comment about that before I would. It's good these games are gaining popularity. I usually don't come accros a GBA performance video that doesn't mention at least one VD-dev title. Look up the XXL Prototype, it includes a full song that was part of the beta content of the home console version, in insane quality while the game still runs full speed. It's insane what could have been if the cartridge had the space for more than 1 direct audio song.
Stop Skeletons From Fighting made a great video about them!
Thank you so much for this information, i did not knew about them and I absolutely loved V-Rallye!
I’m so sorry to hear that one of those legends already passed on..
Thanks for the glowing review of Goomba Color. I appreciate it. The most interesting part of developing that emulator was in the way the background layers were managed. A GBC background tilemap effectively needs three GBA layers (High Priority tiles and Color 0 tiles), and the GBC can show two layers side by side using the Window feature. Combine that with the emulator's UI and the SGB border layer, you could need to display as many as 8 layers, while the GBA only has 4 layers. So there's a bit of complicated code that manages when each kind of background layers are used.
Thank you for getting me through some really bad times.
You're responsible for introducing a brand new generation to Dragon's Lair, by the way. (They sort of liked the graphics and nothing else.)
I wish more developers had taken notes from Goomba Color. None of the Gameboy emulators I've seen since, have as many palettes built in.
I only semi-recently discovered Goomba Color when experimenting with a new flashcart, and I was immediately impressed by the featureset and polish of Goomba Color. The custom L menu has some super neat stuff in it, and being able to combine multiple games into one rom (and hotswap between them instantaneously) is genuinely more convenient than most emulators on PC.
It is clear that Goomba Color was actually designed to be used, with attention and care put into the user experience. This is uncommon on most emulators, and rare on homebrew emulators.
If it weren't for RetroAchievements, I would probably be running Goomba Color even on PC emulators because it's really convenient to wrap all the pokemon games together in one rom :P
This kind of "emulation" is the most interesting. You're translating things between what each set of hardware uses, having to approximate in some cases. It's sort of like the high-level emulation used in some 3D system emulators (the first N64 one I believe).
speaking of emulation, i recently played through xenosaga on my phone with a new ps2 emulator, and was in disbelief that it looked and ran perfectly the whole way through. i also played a little ffx, ffxii, and shadow hearts, and they all seemed to run equally well from what i saw. it's crazy what these emulators can do these days. sadly my phone couldn't quite handle xenosaga 2 or 3. i never got to play 3 and was really excited thinking i'd finally get to.
i first discovered the trails series on ppsspp on my phone, playing trails in the sky 1 and 2 and both crossbell games, and they became my favorite games ever. i have nes, snes, gbc, gba, ds, psp, ps1, and n64 emulators on my phone and they all work perfectly. even some dreamcast and gamecube games run really well, and as i already mentioned quite a few ps2 games run great on here. i got a mount for my ps4 controller to mount my phone to it, basically turning it into a portable gaming console that can play all of those games.
I'm pretty sure what the SNES has over the GBA audio-wise has a lot less to do with bit depth and a lot more to do with the fact it actually has dedicated sound hardware... The SNES has 8 sound channels in which it can play whatever samples it can squeeze into memory independently from one-another, whereas the GBA only has two, so if you ever wanna play more than two samples on the system at once you gotta mix them into those two channels in software, and the more samples you try to mix in at once the worse it's going to sound...
That's not to say the GBA can't sound good though, or heck, even outdo the SNES in that regard... While the GBA doesn't have sound hardware of its own, it did carry over the GB/C soundchip for backwards compatibility, and you've no doubt heard it being used in the GBA's own games, it was fairly common practise... But the more interesting thing you can do with it is use it in tandem with the GBA's own Direct Audio, if you split the duty of playing back music between the GB/C soundchip and the GBA DA, well, you're not gonna have to mix as much stuff into the DA, and as a result, not only will the quality of the individual samples increase, but the resulting audio will be an unique, and frankly delightful, mix of GB/C beeps and bloops and slightly crunchy samples, which if you ask me, sound right at home together!
This can be heard at its best in a lil' game I love called Densetsu no Stafy, but other very good examples are Mario Kart Super Circuit, Puyo Pop, Gyakuten Saiban 3 and Zelda Minish Cap.
But this is no advantage over the SNES audio, it's just a neat feature, the REAL advantage the GBA has over the SNES in terms of sound is just a heck of a lot more memory and storage, which it could use to get away with much higher quality raw samples, I've heard it being said time and time again that SNES samples are a bit muffled, well, that's not always the case but it is a fairly common occurrence due to how audio compression is handled on the system, and that's a problem the GBA simply doesn't have, games that actually tried to make good use of the GBA's audio managed to have much clearer-sounding samples, barring the slight hiss that you're inevitably going to get, just give Mother 3, Golden Sun and Iridion 2 a good listen...
But that's not all! How about some lyrics? Tales of Phantasia on SNES had an intro cinematic with a song which had full lyrics in it! That's impressive in and of itself! And the song sounds pretty decent, if a bit muffled... But ok, how about the GBA? I'll point you towards Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch - Pichi Pichitto Live Start, which is a rhythm game (and a bloody good one at that) which has, well, an entire rhythm game worth of songs with full lyrics in it... 17 of them to be precise, which isn't a lot by modern rhythm game standards, but is a lot more than you could possibly expect to fit on a SNES cartridge without a frickin' MSU-1 chip... And it sounds pretty decent all things considered, the voices are clearer than what you've heard in Tales of Phantasia, even if not by much, and the rest of the instrumentation is reasonably decent! If anything, it's proof the GBA can pull off an idol rhythm game if it wants to...
The real takeaway here isn't that the GBA has better sound than the SNES or anything, or vice-versa, the two systems simply handle sound very differently from one-another, so naturally, if you try to square-peg SNES music into the round hole of GBA audio, it's probably just not gonna come out right... But if you take the GBA's audio as its own thing, and play to its strengths, you can absolutely get wonderful results!
I completely agree. WSC/SNES ports of the first six Final Fantasy games ( except III ) were able to dedicate quite a lot of CPU power to sound, as there usually wasn't a lot of graphics to render or move around, only notable exception being VI. In exchange for a bit of lag in menu selection and casting spells, these games were able to obtain very good music quality, also likely using some of that GB/C soundchip for bass or a wide range of sfx. While VI had to suffer poorer quality, the increased memory space allowed for an actual voice sample to be used at the opera scene instead of what the SNES had, which sounded far more robotic.
In fact, a bunch of flagship Nintendo titles ( Mario, Zelda... ) were able to use very convincing voice clips that the SNES really couldn't afford with its memory. The SNES kept it to very short amounts usually, like the "Emergency" in Star Fox, or "Okesuka?" and "I miss you" in Earthbound.
Also, best example I know of doing the opposite and relying mostly on the GB/C soundchip would be for Asterix Bash 'em all ( 2002 ). That game is a 2 in 1, one of them being original and the other a SNES port of Asterix & Obelix ( 1995 ). Alberto Jose Gonzalez composed for all of the aforementionned. As he is extremely capable with Gameboy music ( as he proved on many games on that system with insanely good tracks ), he chose to use the GB/C soundchip as the primary chip responsible for all the melody and bass effects he knew so well how to do. He then tasked the GBA DA to do occasionnal percussions in the songs, and the sound effects, like punches and enemy grunts. The result sounds very pleasing, and the SNES port doesn't sound cheap at all, instead using its own style. It's worth a listen!
Bit depth has surprisingly little to do with the quality of the audio anyway (and I HATE how often chiptune is incorrectly called "8-Bit.") Most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 24 and 12 bit recording, especially without nice equipment. All bit depth really does is determine the MAX amount of dynamic range and MIN noise floor. When it comes to fidelity sample rate is king!
yep,a good example of this is contra 3. the SNES version has a wonderful orchestral/militaristic soundtrack that really gets the blood pumping.the GBA port,however... doesn't.
Sony designed sound hardware
GBA was a phenomenal portable power house, one that’s well ahead of the SNES. It’s primary relative weakness was sound quality, which on the SNES was exceptional in terms of hardware.
What's the point of just repeating things from the video we all just watched as though they're comments
Some people actually thought the SNES was more powerful and its like.. The GBA could do Polygons by itself and the SNES needed a chip???
3 of the impressive GBA games showing 3D, V-Rally 3, Driv3r and Asterix XXL were all developed by VD-Dev, an insane duo of a single programmer and a graphic designer, Fernando Velez and Guillaume Dubail, who are known for breaking the boundaries of handheld hardware in their games.
Asterix XXL in specific was so impressive in fact, that its pototype found recently played a minute long music track ( which was beta content of the home console version already ), in such quality that i've never believed possible on the system. The typical 8-bit crunch is nowhere to be heard, or might be very faint. The final game could have very well had paired high graphics with high music ( as the prototype shows debug rooms who aren't empty by all means ), however since that track took over half the cartridge's memory, it obviously had to be swapped to songs made out of tiny snippets of samples ( that sound far, far worse sadly ) put together into like 8 songs, made by someone outside VD-dev, Allister Brimble ( different composer from the home console version ).
Theorically, it would be possible to have a huge GBA rom on a flashcart play this game with high quality music without much performance impact. Perhaps all the VD-dev games could, as the level of optimisations for those games are simply insane. XXL's engine could have made a very faithful Spyro game, with few drawbacks.
Exactly! And their games usually run in full resolution, while many other 3D GBA games don't. They e.g. use half the vertical and/or horizontal resolution. This makes a huge difference on the already low res GBA screen.
VD-dev used some special rendering trick though which was visible in the kind of unique camera distortion it introduced on the screen.
Don't forget their games on Game Boy Color. Most of them have Alberto Jose Gonzalez as composer (Lucky Luke, V-Rally, The Smurfs' Nightmare, Bugs & Lola Bunny Operation Carrot)
@@supmattboy Of course! I own Smurf's Nightmare and The Smurfs, he composed for both.
@@cube2fox That texture "distortion" you mention is due to the sprite engine (which was used to draw the 3D quads (it used quads instead of triangles)) doing affine transformations (a simpler and faster "short-cut" to transform texture maps onto quads).
Many people think that these 3D games for the GBA are all rendered in software by the CPU, but this is not true. The ARM7 @ 14MHz CPU was much too slow to do this...
Because the GBA had full transform capabilities for sprites (eg quads with textures), the CPU could use the sprite engine to draw a up to a hundred or so fully transformed, affine textured quads to the screen, making it possible to have those 3D games run at a playable speed...
The SEGA saturn used a similar technique, transforming texture mapped "sprites" onto the screen, which is why it only supported quads and not triangles for it's scene geometry.
@@HPPalmtopTube The Saturn didn't have the camera distortion effect though you see e.g. in Asterix and Obelix XXL. Other 3D GBA games not by VD-dev also didn't have this distortion, although they mostly ran much worse.
17:42 GBA doesn't use sample based audio processors, it doesn't have an audio processor at all :D
It has the same sound generator channels from the OG GameBoy, as well two PCM channels that let you essentially play back WAV data (so samples, if you want. Or an entire music file in one go!)
You have to spend precious CPU time mixing samples in software, which is why a lot of GBA games just use the GameBoy audio as it's less CPU power to handle that
The PCM channels have a bit depth of 8-bits, but the actual sound output is 9-bits and you can achieve this by playing back the two PCM channels together and letting the audio circuitry add them to 9-bit output
no you are wrong im sorry
@@CHICKENmcNUGGIESMydude I'm pretty sure that Xilefian right. Wikipedia lists this to be the case: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance#Technical_specifications
And, if you don't trust Wikipedia, here's another source with examples: www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/game-boy-advance/#audio
The GBA has a standard sound library that the vast majority of games used, and that provided a MIDI-like format with sampled instruments.
@@Dwedit hey it's Dwedit! Your work is awesome, I'm a huge fan!
Now that I'm older, I understand that the GBA was released as a stop-gap, seeing as their previous 32bit handheld project was delayed for a while. A pity it was only a few years on the market, especially compared to the GB/GBC. A ton of games on that system, though, and pretty fun to mess around with. Still loving my Glacier Blue :')
the GBC was the real stop-gap. Nintendo were trying to get a 32-bit handheld to market in the late 90s (project Atlantis), but it didn't come to fruition -- until GBA that is. The reason they put out the DS after only 3 years of GBA was that the PSP was on the horizon and Nintendo needed to compete.
@@TrevRockOne Well, they took a "third pillar" approach, initially, with the DS - only when it really took off did they axe the GBA
I remember seeing Duke Nukem on the GBA and having my jaw drop. Bought a GBA on the spot.
To be more precise on GBA sound quality, the main reason it doesn't sound good isn't about bit depth but the lack of interpolation on sample playback. That makes for a very grainy sound, when you have for example 8khz samples stretched to fit the 32khz output. The SNES used equally bad and even shorter samples, but they sounded better because of the superb gaussian interpolation used (it also muffled them quite a bit). Since GBA processes audio in software, adding interpolation would have been quite taxing on the CPU
That's really interesting, thanks! I will definitely have to read up on this topic more.
Agreed. The low bit-depth of GBA led to noisy sound (e.g. Metroid Fusion's otherwise great soundtrack). But the lack of a DSP, and sound taking CPU away from the game, lead to poor audio engines; graphics are generally prioritized over sound. The SNES resampled things using a multi-point convolution. Doing that in software would be time-consuming, as convolution is (lots of multiplies for every sample). Finally, since the unit was portable and mostly heard via its built-in tiny speaker, in an environment that may be noisy, SNES-quality audio would be somewhat of a waste.
What's interpolation
In addition, for the 2 of you out there who don't know this, the SNES has a Sony sound chip. The GBA does not, for obvious reasons.
@@DrCasey Calculating points between the ones available. Multiple methods available for audio, some taking a good amount of math.
You can’t imagine how long I’ve waited to see a video from you with this title. The GBA is my favorite game system, and I’m happy to see it get the appreciation it rightfully deserves
It sold millions dude.
I agree. I love how its inbetween the SNES and NES graphically.
Lord of the ring for gba besr
i don't appreciate it, the SP was a million times better...
@@ryanwalker4660 what
I'd love to see something on the PSP and the DS and how those stacked up against the home consoles. PSP vs the PS1 and PS2 and DS vs the N64 and PS1
psp emulates the ps1 natively and emulates gba and gb flawlessly, it emulates some n64 games well (without sound) it doesn't do well with many snes games, many Ps2 games were ported to the psp, that is the only way you will play ps2 games without a ps2, an original ps3 or a darn good pc. The DS will run DS games all the way back to old gameboy and can emulate the old nintendo line if it wasnt ported. Nintendo ported any n64 games with resale value to the ds with some twists. The DS had touch screen and two screens which is a turd to port, or play emulated. Basically Dreamcast Ps2 and N64 are turds to emulate properly without a lot of power. Ps3 on has been multiplatform as far as games except for a few proprietary titles such as Halo.
@@chrisagler8472 “darn good pc” what year are you in anything made in the last 10 years can emulate ps2 fine lol
@@Benzona I wouldn't go that far. My Dell laptop that I bought in Nov. 2011 could run a PS2 emulator but not at full frame rate. It came with a lousy 4 GB of RAM & eventually I was barely able to afford an upgrade by replacing one of the two 2 GB memory sticks with a 4 GB one, only giving me a total of 6 GB, and even that was barely enough to run a game. It also came with a shitty Intel HD graphics card that didn't support OpenGL very well & had to rely on DirectX11 which isn't the best choice either.
Then I bought a Lenovo laptop made in 2013 but had much more RAM (16 GB), better GPU & more cores, and only then can I run PS2 games smoothly.
@@Animebryan2 I also have a Dell laptop, but this time from 2012. Exactly the same specs as you said, can't run PS2. I wish you good luck with your new laptop
The DS is slightly more poweful than the PS1 to my knowledge
My favourite channel :D great to see your subs rising! from the perspective of a high level programmer? your breakdown of techniques as pseudo algorithms and processes rather than as code? is what I appreciate the most - it allows me to understand the points you're making and the capabilities of the device without having to keep track of registers in my head!
Well thanks for your kind words, it's always nice to see your comments!
Stop the hammer holding
The GBA was a (long overdue) update to the Gameboy line, handheld tech was pretty stagnant for a good while beforehand.
Yeah due to there not being very much competition and Pokemon revitalizing Gameboy sales Nintendo didn't bother pushing out any successors for a long time
Honestly the rest of the tech in creating mobile devices had to catch up beforehand to make it worthwhile, I doubt lots of minor upgrades would have helped the game boy stay dominant, it might even have detracted from it. Even the GBA was flawed with the GBA SP fixing them with rechargeable battery, backlight and clamshell design to protect screen scratches, just a less comfortable design and no headphone socket(!).
When it comes to audio bits, you really want more. 8 bit is 255 steps, 16 is 65k steps. That really makes a difference to the human ear.
Even if the gba sound quality was inferior to the snes sounds, you cannot lie that some games really took advantage of those intense gba sounds and made some bopping osts that really fit in that form.
WarioWare and Wario 4, for example.
Mother 3 is one of those games that has the best soundtrack for GBA
harmony of dissonance
Advanced Wars 1 & 2. So many good tracks I could listen to over and over in a 100+ hour games.
Iridion 3D and 2, made on Amiga, sounds like Amiga.
Asterix Bash them all, using at its peak the 4 Game Boy channels.
20:18 That's *flat-shading* _not_ Gouraud shading. Gouraud shading linearly interpolates intensity at each triangle point to smooth the shading across it, allowing the shading to smoothly range across the polygon surface. Flat-shading just adjusts the _entire surface_ as the same color, the intensity of which corresponding to how much it faces the light source. I could go into vast detail on the mathematics of this, but hopefully that explanation suffices.
- Game programmer
sounds like anti-aliasing before it was called that...
@@ryanwalker4660 It’s not at all like that.
Genuine wow at Open Lara's performance. Only wow game I'd chuck in the mix though it's more like an Amiga tech demo is Iridion II. The CG rendered graphics look incredible to this day. Genuinely looks like a fully 3D rendered game despite all being sprites and the like.
I bought a used GBA last week. At home I have my modded SNES classic and for travelling I play on the GBA, I'm happy with this two great systems. It's a good handheld, but the two missing buttons make a huge difference!
why don't you play on your Switch and 3DS? mod them and they can play GBA games if that's what you want.
how many games you got i got 40k games on my chinese hand held
the whole GBA library
I used to have an advance sp ags101, but nowadays use my modded 2dsxl for playing that system. Nice for savestates as well...
There's a nice homebrew version of 'castle master' on the Gba....try that out, I can recommend....
@@CHICKENmcNUGGIESMydude I'm sure you need them. Every single one from 40 000 games...
I've owned just about every major handheld released but I've been completely converted by a recent Anbernic retro-emulator. Beautiful screen, virtually flawless emulation and no need to worry about taking the correct cartridges with me.
Great video about a handheld that doesn't get enough love! I have one small quibble though: DOOM did NOT use a Raycasting engine--that would be its precursor, Wolfenstein 3D. DOOM used a different method called BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) to achieve its faux-3D look.
I seem to remember reading a really long time ago that the floors and ceilings in Doom are are drawn one horizontal line at a time (because that makes the math simpler) while the walls are drawn one vertical line at a time, which would be hard to do with pure ray casting.
What i loved about the gba was that its basically a snes portable. Though the snes ports suck in comparisson to the real deal. Also the gba is basically a 32bit console pretending to be a 16bit console. Snes is the best console ever made, gba is up there.
@@kadupse n64 is definitely 2nd best to me
you both spelled C64 wrong
Y'all be smokin' some whack crack! PS2 was the best console ever made. It was backwards compatible with PS1 games, had an extensive library of games on its own (including a lot of good JRPGs), and it could play both music CDs & DVDs, all in one system!
@@jonathanchalmers7844 eh... i dont think we did. C64 was cool but not that cool
@@jonathanchalmers7844 i am interested to know though, did you get the c64 mini and if so do you like it?
The low fidelity audio was te only issue I had with it, An absolutely great system with some of my favourite games of the time.
I still love programming 3D on the GBA! It's so rewarding. Such a great console.
The Virtual Boy was an interesting stepping stone between GB and GBA. It had a 20 MHz 32-bit RISC processor that could do some kinds of rotation. The Wario Land was great for it.
That's a potential question for an upcoming video: Was the Virtual Boy more powerful than the GBA?
@blargg I believe that kind of pseudo 3D rotation seen on the SNES , Virtual boy & GBA is technically called affine transformation Nintendo just called in mode 7
Affine transformation is a type of geometric transformation. Mode 7 is a graphics mode on the SNES that can apply affine transformations to a background layer. Affine transformation alone isn’t enough to create the 3D effects seen in SNES games.
@@SnakebitSTI So affine transformations + X is enough. But what is X?
@@cube2fox Enlarging the background a little bit between each line gives the 3d floor effect seen in games like Mario Kart.
@ 15:20
It definitely has happened.
Steam Deck's a handheld and it emulates the Switch.
Yes I do realise that statement is probably an underhanded nod to this and how Nintendo handled the uploaded footage of the said emulation.
20:18 That's not Gouraud shading. That's actually flat shading.
Gouraud shading is shading that's smoothened in order to hide the boundaries of each polygon.
The shading in this demo is not at all smooth like Gouraud shading is.
Ive been saying this for years and people called me crazy. People judge the GBA sound capabilities based on comparing the soundtracks of Super NES to GBA ports alone, but the music composed from the ground up for GBA often matches or surpasses the Super NES.
Def doesn't surpass
@@IAm-zo1bo I'd love to see the Super Nintendo pull off an compromised rendition of the MOTHER 3 soundtrack.
@@SuperTrainStationH listen to dkc2 ost
@@IAm-zo1bo It indeed does in some occasions, just listen to this th-cam.com/video/xoTwj42szX0/w-d-xo.html
4:50
I think it also is because of resolution. The GBA was 160p compared to the 220p of the SNES. That low 160p resolution was consistently the biggest shortcoming of the GBA. It made it challenging sometimes to really take full advantage of it's power.
Sound 🗿
I loved the GBA SP, but its biggest downside which made SNES ports inferior to play(some unplayable) was the only 2 face buttons. I really wish it had 4. Its my favorite console, and the only handheld that was a daily carry for me, but it really needed that
I absolutely agree. When I play GBA on emulation systems I map the shoulders to face buttons.
Not every game would suit that play style though. Metroid Fusion for example use the shoulder buttons for aiming, assigning L and R to the Y and X buttons makes aiming feel awkward when you also had to use B and A along with it.
It's funny because while I do hear this criticism a lot, i've actually only played one single GBA game that I feel suffers from lack of buttons. Kingdom Hearts COM. It could have used a dedicated button for the dodge and another for stocking cards. Instead, dodging is handled by double tapping the dpad. It works but feels clunky. Stocking is L+R. Again it works, but i'd occasionally press one too soon and it would scroll through the deck instead and messes me up. I've used emulators that have allowed you to map an L+R press to a separate single button and it functions beautifully (the PS2 remake also mapped it to triangle I believe, and also used the traditional square to dodge).
I don't play fighting games, but i'm sure they are also impacted by the lack of buttons as well (the few that are on the system anyway). But other than those, I can't actually think of any other games that suffered from having only two face buttons. The two Metroid games actually control better than Super IMO, they streamlined and simplified the way weapons work (there's even a popular rom hack for Super that implements the GBA controls). For Megaman, I vastly prefer having the dash mechanic mapped to a shoulder button instead of one of the face buttons. Same goes for the spinjump in Mario World, and especially the egg aiming in Yoshi's Island. The teamup move in the DKC games also worked well with the shoulder buttons. I do prefer playing the SNES versions over their GBA ports for other reasons, but the control alterations almost always worked extremely well. I've even occasionally remapped the SNES version controls when possible to work like they did on GBA. The shoulder buttons were often underutilized on many SNES games, which is a shame.
@@granvillimus there were a lot of games that suffered. Try playing tales of phantasia. Was snes game ported
@@drowningin The GBA version of Phantasia sucks ass for sure. But the lack of buttons wasn't among my issues with it. It feels sluggis and there's tons of slowdown, the game's visuals and music are also terrible. It's not even a direct "port" of the SNES version either, the battle system was reworked to function like the PS1 version. It plays very differently. It could have been a good version had the other issues been fixed.
The Need for Speed Underground games were impressive for their time as well.
I was actually wondering about this just this morning because I was testing out some GBA Games and I noticed that they do look impressive even now. I didn’t realize how extensive the game library was for this portable either there’s so many games that I need to get around for checking out for the first time from GBA
Also i actually like the low sound quality, it gives the games charm
GBA games also have OST that absolutely slaps
Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga and Pokemon RSE are the pinnacle of GBA ost
Glad you mentioned the FANTASTIC Doom source port on GBA. It's the most impressive port I've ever seen. If you haven't played it yet...you really should!
Great video Sharopolis!
3:12 Minor correction about the GBA's "bitness." What is referred to here, is the two instruction sets. The regular 32bit ARM mode and the "compressed" 16bit thumb mode. Both could be used in the same program, but switching between them was not free, I believe.
The important thing to note and the core of this correction is, that thumb mode does not change anything about the bitness of the CPU or of anything else. It is still a 32bit CPU, albeit with some restrictions that enable the smaller operation coding.
The reason thumb mode was used so much, is that the program is executed directly from the cartridge, which is accessed via a 16bit bus. That means each ARM mode instruction requires two reads, thus making the CPU wait for twice as long and slowing it down considerably. Despite that ARM mode was sometimes used for important and complex routines that were first copied to the much faster internal work RAM (external work RAM was much bigger at 256k than the internal 32k one and a good bit faster than cartridges, but was also limited by a 16bit bus). You might have needed more thumb instructions for certain things, but at least the CPU was doing useful work with each instruction read.
Take it with a grain of salt, it's been some 20 years since I last programmed the GBA. I did however work on the NDS for years after that and it also used the same CPU as a coprocessor to the somewhat slightly more modern main CPU. (I did confirm it all, to make sure there weren't any big mistakes due to misremembering.)
I really enjoyed programming the GBA and later the NDS. They both still were the sort of system that a single programmer with enough experience could keep in their head, with all the features, modes and limitations (at least the most common bits).
Another 3D GBA game that I like to bring up when mentioning impressive ones is Top Gear Rally. It doesn't look quite as good as V-Rally 3 overall I'd say but it runs perhaps a bit more consistently because it doesn't try to throw as much impressive stuff on the screen. V-Rally 3 is more impressive for sure but for a racing game, framerate is crucial and most 3D racing games on GBA tended to run really bad.
Tomb Raider GBA is perhaps the most impressive development to ever grace the system though. When I first saw it, pretty sure my jaw dropped, so sad we never got to see back in the day as a commercial release, i would have bought that!
Too Gear Rally does run smoother, but I do think VD-Dev should still be commended for the performance in their games.
All of their typically manage a consistent 20fps which is pretty good by the standards of 3D GBA games. I know there's far simpler 3D games on the system that run much worse than that.
Ещё посмотри Cars national championship
Have you seen Quake for GBA? It actually runs, thanks to Randy Linden.
@@Kynareth6 Saw MVG's video on it yeah. That too is super impressive
I never understood why the NES classics for GBA were compromised watered down ports, surely the GBA was more than capable of playing those NES games
I think, more than anything, is that they just didn't care enough and just wanted to get such old games out for sale rather than do them right.. There is a long history of old games being released for later consoles in poor states. Sonic 1 on GBA is a good example of that. And there have been many official emulation collections over the years that have had major issues that were deemed fit for release. The big issue with NES games on GBA is the screen resolution.
@@ravagingwolverine Just look at recent Chrono Cross port. Runs worse than on PS1.
Screen resolution is lower for one, thats one reason out of many I never bothered
GBA was a nice system, Aria of Sorrow being a huge highpoint for me even though I played it maybe 10 years after it came out?
DS vs N64 seems natural next
The reason the GBA was superseded so quickly was because of the PSP, this forced Nintendo to release another console with new features to compete with the PSP, and that was the Nintendo DS (Yamauchi said he wanted a console with 2 screens).
Look at the first presentation of Nintendo DS, Reggie held the 2 covers with a lot of pressure so that they did not fall to the ground with his hand, since he had a sketch of the design of the future console created in a short time to present it at E3.
I cant beleive how insanely powerful the psp is
Its slightly more powerful than Dreamcast but less powerful than PS2
It's not more powerful than the Dreamcast, you're either vastly overstating the PSP's power or majorly understating the Dreamcast's.
@@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung i hope it can play games like God Of War, GTA Stories, Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII
@@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung can it play Monster Hunter 3rd
@@The_Prizessin_der_Verurteilung CPU PSP's 333mhz vs Dreamcast's 200mhz. RAM PSP's 64mb vs Dreamcast's 16mb, Specifically Raw power PSP's 2.6Gigaflop vs Dreamcast's 2.1Gigaflop. The Dreamcast surpass PSP GPUs 200mhz on dreamcast vs 100mhz psp and resolution 640x480 on dreamcast vs 480x272 on psp and VRAM 8mb on dreamcast vs 2mb on PSP. As i say, PSP is just "slightly" more powerful than Dreamcast, it can render graphics so much better than Dreamcast but in specs aspect, both almost close
Watching your videos gives me such a sense of nostalgia. Your accent reminds me so much of old Video Game TV shows and reviews I used to watch as a kid. im so glad someone with your accent has taken up the challenge of providing reviews of video game stuff! Been subscribed a while, but wanted to say thanks!
9:06 There was actually a game for the GBA called "Star x" that plays just like Star Fox and it even was one of the first titles to come out for the handheld. Pretty decent game playwise.
It was shown in the BG of the video later
Normally when someone I'm subscribed to uploads, I'll wait a while, then skim the video and leave halfway through. When you upload, I stop what I'm doing and watch the entire thing every time. I never get bored of this stuff.
The Archimedes showed the power of ARM chips, but maybe the GBA was ARMs first hit system, which made people sit up and take notice? Not sure that's true, was ARM used for something else popular before GBA?
Yes, the ARM architecture also used in the Nokia 3310 (the same processor used on GBA)
Not to mention that Nintendo continued to use ARM for their handhelds, up to the N3DS.
I was not expecting to see you here?
ARM chips were also used in Pocket PCs, which depending on model could be decent emulation devices at the time. I was able to play NES, some SNES and Genesis on the device.
@@SoftBlade7 Really? I remember the 3310 games looked more basic than even the original Gameboy games.
I still remember the first time I saw that Doom had come out on the GBA. I made a split second decision right then and there that I could pay my phone bill late. This was way more important. And it was a wise decision--being able to play Doom on the bus to and from work was amazing.
I really wish the gba had the full 4 face buttons. It's such an amazing system and thinking about the extra possibilities with the full set of face buttons makes my brain tingle
That, and no backlight kept me away from it.
GBA - my first handheld console (not counting original GB borrowed from my neighbour). So many great games. Wonderful memories :).
I didn't know that it was so much more powerful than SNES. Very informative and interesting video.
This makes me wonder what a GBA equivalent to the Super FX chips would have been like or been able to pull out of the system.
GBA cartridges were too small to have any extra processing chips put inside so I don't think they could have made an equivalent. GBA cartridges were barely big enough to contain the memory chip for the rom file plus the game save chip.
@@pauldavis5665 They could have just made the carts bigger, some games were bigger than the slot on the system anyway for specialized purposes, so why couldn't the same be done for additional processing capability?
@@GVGINU Or do something similar to Gameshark, and have a passthrough cartridge.
When I was but a wee lad I totally thought of the GBA as a portable SNES and also my first soiree into the Metroid franchise was for GBA and those games looked amazing even when compared to Super Metroid, also I don't have to be stuck in my (or more likely someone else's) living room to experience that level of quality.
This channel is great. I'd love to see you do the same for stuff like the Turbo Grafix and Neo Geo and other retro gaming systems as well.
The Arm architecture was designed from the ground up as a full 32 bit Cpu with a decent register set. It's a beast compared to 16Bit systems.
15:20 The Steam Deck can emulate the Nintendo Switch.
That was the joke.
The SNES’s advantage in the Audio department is actually BIGGER than you made it out to be. The SNES had EIGHT 32kHz/16-bit PCM sound channels, while the GBA had TWO 32kHz/8-bit PCM channels + The original Gameboy’s PSG which added 2 Pulse Channels, a Noise Channel, and a 4-bit Wavetable channel-and again, without a dedicated audio processor like the SNES to take load off the CPU. Needless to say, this makes it much more difficult to adapt SNES soundtracks to the GBA, as you’d have to pick which two sound channels to “just” crunch down to 8-bit, which one to jam into 4-bit, which to REPLACE with pulse and noise (in practice, often the SFX, with the 2 PCMs and WAV channel reserved for BGM), and which to drop entirely. I’ve seen tricks in the music tracker scene where folks use the 4-bit wavetable and superposition to create multiple “phantom” channels, but again, that’s a huge tradeoff. Converting Music from SNES to GBA was not at all straightforward, and while it can do a decent job with smart use of the tools available, anything that was using the full capability of the SNES for its soundtrack will need to be severely trimmed to run on the GBA.
It may be more powerful than the SNES, but the GBA audio sounds like it's coming out of two cans and a string.
Find anything that sounds as good as Sonic Advance, Pokémon Emerald or Need for Speed on SNES and I'll eat my hat. (I don't have a hat.)
A great comparison. I’d really like to see the Gameboy Color vs the Game Gear.
The good old GBA - it was out at just the right time for my son, but I loved it - doom was cool... but IMO the most impressive game is Monkey Ball.
Remember this was one of those rare times being able to get this a little after launch with Tony Hawks Pro Skater and it impressing everyone.
The audio limitations make sense, as you can see with the Castlevania games starting with Circle of the Moon having a larger focus on audio vs the sequel going for visual instead.
*"imagine if they released a handheld now that could emulate the switch"*
is that not literally the steam deck lol
Lol, and it only costs about 30% more than a switch too!
@@esmith13 it does everything better than a Switch, so F. those 30℅.
i was pleasently surprised when i first played the duke nukem port on the advance sp.
quite impressive for a small hand held system.
GBAs short comings...... sound.
22:05 The GBA player definitely wasn't in a pocket form factor lol X3 Pedantics aside, great video!
The GP32 is, in many ways a much more powerful machine from the same era. I think it came out a bit before the GBA. It is also quite similar in other ways like the look of the machine. It can play Doom much better and for some games, it can emulate a GBA.
It came out in Novermber 2001. The GBA was released in March of 2001.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 OK. It is still better by a long way in every way. There are ton of emulators that run at full speed too. The screen is MUCH better. Maybe the GBA has better battery life. I'm not sure. I've always run mine on rechargeables. (I have a GP32 non-lit version and a GP2X) I bought both back when they were new.
Can that even be counted as a console i think only only ran homebrew open source games i have never even seen it in person.
How much did GP32 cost over the years?
@@tarstarkusz
From what I've seen in the community, the GP32's battery life wasn't the only issue. Complaints about hardware errors and data corruption are worryingly common, even back in the day.
And the official library can't begin to compete.
But yeah, so long as it worked for you, there was no comparison in terms of raw power.
Nintendo really got smart with handheld systems starting with the GBA. Instead of falling into the trap like Sega and Sony did of trying to get current gen graphics on a mobile platform, they simply took the previous gen and refined it. This allows them to keep cost down and greatly expand the player base.
Low Spec Gamer had a nice vid on Why the DMG1 was as it was.
Basically, (besides the usual N shenanigans...) N chose to go for price, stable tech, battery life, and mass market vs the cutting-edge competition. Just like Wii. It was a system that everyone could own, not just the wealthy. Then they packaged it with Tetris...
th-cam.com/video/9Ki-kH751_8/w-d-xo.html
the colour pallet issues could've been alleviated if we would've gotten backlit screens to begin with. does not make emulation the nicest experience for the affected games lol
The thing is the gba has an awesome game library, i had the psp too and I always ended up playing the GBA instead, common bateries made it so much more convinient too.
The first 2 Duke nukem games were side scrollers. They must have ported it from pc. The first person duke nukem was Duke Nukem 3D
I think the gbc duke nukem is it's only thing.
The GBA SP was the only video game system I had for years. I got it for Christmas 2003 when I was 8 years old. It's still my favorite handheld system and always will be. I admit that nostalgia plays a part in that but I still play it to this day. Still take it on trips. It's just the perfect portable system to me forever.
SNES games are still some of the best of all time and GBA able to play good ports of them helped keep those games in everyone's minds and introduce to new generation of kids, as well as appreciation of 2D art which was very unfashionable when 3D games became the industry obsession.
Nintendo’s handhelds are honestly some of the greatest systems ever created. Especially the GBA, DS, and 3DS.
For a long time I never realized the GBA was capable of 3D, since every game I got for it back in the day was 2D or pre-rendered graphics. So it blew my mind years later when I saw footage of games running with fully 3D environments, I never thought I'd see the GBA get a category on Models Resource. I had always viewed the DS as Nintendo's first 3D handheld. But now people are pushing this thing to its absolute limit, there's even a Super Mario 64 homebrew remake being made. I'm honestly very interested in seeing where that goes and I'd love to be able to play it some day.
Yeah the GBA is powered by an 16.78 MHz ARM 32-bit microprocessor that could run circles around the Snes's Ricoh 5A22 16-bit processor running at 3.5 MHz. Still, this is a fantastic video.
Wait a minute...the Steam Deck can emulate a Nintendo Switch.
Wonderfully informative. I've always fond pushing the limits on the old handhelds fascinating.
"It might not satisfy hardcore Doom enthusiasts, there's probably still SOME out there..."
Oh we're still here alright! :D
You make it very clear. I learn a lot from you on a subject that I've liked ever since the 80/86 cpu, CGA graphic card days.
Gba was more powerful but didn't have 89.99pounds price games like snes with extra graphics cips built in cartrige rendering most of the graphics.Was kind of clever cheat from snes
I recently just got back I to retro gaming after MANY years. I was a child thru the beginning of it all and by the time the GBA had come out I was a teenager and worried about the latest disk system. When was recently looking into playin the old games I grew up playing,before I ended up with a rg351p, I was blown away by the specs of the GBA and couldn't help but think how amazing it would have been in the mid 90's instead of the early 2000's
90s handheld technology was simply too bad, any improvements would have been very incremental. Probably the biggest is simply clarity of the screen, which showed in the GB Pocket and Light. The sega game gear has beautiful screen and backlight but only few hours of battery and weighed a ton with 6 AA batteries.
The gba was almost perfect. The sound was so abysmal and a step backwards from the snes version. It made rpgs much less impactful because the gorgeous music was butchered by the low quality sound
The GBA was actually capable of pretty great sound, but it was not 1:1 compatible with SNES music. Trying to port pre-existing compositions that were designed around the sound capabilities of the SNES just isn't really going to work well on the GBA, because you're basically trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Plenty of games - even genuinely good ones - did not prioritize the sound quality, partially because of the lack of dedicated sound hardware, but the GBA could make genuinely beautiful sounds if the composition takes advantage of its unique strengths. There were just slightly too many reasons for most developers to half-ass the sound in favor of other things, so a large portion of the GBA's library does sound like shit.
But comparing it directly to the SNES isn't really fair because of the inherent differences between how the two generate sound.
@@DELTARYZ Yup. Some good titles include Golden Sun, Mother 3 and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Red Rescue Team. They proved you can actually be nostalgic to how the GBA sounds specifically ( come to think of it, there truly is no other system on earth that ever ressembled that, right? )
@@DELTARYZ I agree, GBA sound essentially relied on how skilled the programmers were to pull things out, and how many CPU they wanted (or they could) spend. The best examples normally come from actual GBA games and not the cheaply-done ports.
Have you ever heard the soundtracks of any game composed by Naofumi Tsuruyama & Takuya Hanaoka? (e. Little Buster Q, Zero Tours, Zoids Saga I & II, Super Robot Wars Original Generation I & II, etc.) Those composers really got the hang of GBA sound, and managed to get the best of both worlds (PCM & PSG). The only downside of their style is that all the PCM is mono, so the only thing capable of panning are the GB sound channels. I recommend you check them out, there's a really good channel here on TH-cam that uploaded a great majority of the soundtracks I mentioned.
Skip the ad at 2:00
you say processor wrong
I can remember being blown away by having Street Fighter 2, Tony Hawk and Doom in my pocket.
2:44 DKC 1-3 are way worse looking and sounding on the GBA than on SNES.
Recently I got out my old Gameboy stuff and I've been enjoying some of my favorites. I'm happy to hear that the GBA can be made to emulate the Gameboy color, since I've been favoring the Gameboy micro, because it's the only Gameboy I have with a lighted screen and rechargeable battery. I missed out on the GBA SP.
8:35 Doom doesn't use ray-casting, it's its own thing entirely
Interestingly, ray-casting is less efficient than Doom style rendering, which is why Wolfenstein 3D on SNES doesn't use ray-casting, uses something closer to Doom.
I've written a few ray-casting engines for GBA, it's definitely not the fastest technique (true for both GBA, and the original 286 Wolf3D was made for)
What technique does Doom GBA use?
@@legacyoftheancientsC64c there isn't a name for it and to describe it will take a LONG time.
The simple explanation is: it uses the angle between vertices of walls and the player's facing direction to check where in 1D space a vertex is projected in a look up table, then calculates the distance of the vertices to the camera plane, then fills the gaps between the two vertices (accounting for a wall "height" meta data)
So it's 2D->1D projection.
Myself and a few others describe this as a 1D span raster engine, but that's not a super descriptive term. "Doom-like" is the best description.
@@Xilefian Sounds similar to an indexed strip caster. Pretty cool. I'll take a look at your channel.
no im sorry but again you are wrong
@@CHICKENmcNUGGIESMydude There's actually a short video that does a good job explaining this and how it's different than raycasting. Here it is: th-cam.com/video/zb6Eo1D6VW8/w-d-xo.html
Great video and this is stuff I've pushed people to look into for years. V-Rally there for instance the polygonal surface, the way it renders, the way it specifically warps along the edges, it renders like Sega Rally Saturn does, handles similarly in many ways but is mindblowing a GBA does that. V3D that was its early game, Asterix in this video here is the last entry along with Driver3. While you highlighted V3D only, why not the equally if not slightly more impressive european Blue Roses engine? Wing Commander Prophecy was its highpoint, the full PC game is there, every stage, every event, just not the campy terrible CGI between stages junk reduced to text boxes. The engine rendered all the explosions, shield burn, weapons fire, many ships even capital sized or being in one to launch and land, the engine also did the impressive Smashing Drive.
Also curious since you covered private emulation projects, why not what loopy/flubba did?? PocketNES and Goomba/Color were amazing, but really something odd that stood out was PCE Advance (PC Engine/TG16) this one ran games from 80-100% speed, largely full which is a lot given but it also runs full on CD games in ISO format so you could have Dracula X and Ys 1+2 in your pocket way way before the PSP conversion of DX.
The warps along the edges you mention are due to the textures being mapped with affine-transformations, a "schort-cut" for faster texture mapping, but you get those distortions at high angles... (BTW: the PS1 and saturn did this too, but the N64 didn't)
Many people think that these 3D games for the GBA are all rendered in software by the CPU, but this is not true. The ARM7 @ 14MHz CPU was much too slow to do this...
Because the GBA had full transform capabilities for sprites (eg quads with textures), the CPU could use the sprite engine to draw a up to a hundred or so fully transformed, affine textured quads to the screen, making it possible to have those 3D games run at a playable speed...
The SEGA saturn used a similar technique, transforming texture mapped "sprites" onto the screen, which is why it only supported quads and not triangles for it's scene geometry.
And yet most of the SNES port are inferior to the originals…
Just found your channel and brilliant video. Definitely be watching your videos from the start.
The sound, however… The SNES crushes.
An interesting video. I overlooked the gba as I never had any of the gameboy devices, first portable Nintendo device I got being the ds lite.
Good choice. Yeah I skipped from the GB pocket to the DS lite. Nothing in between seemed worth it. The GBA SP almost seemed worth it, but it was super cramped, only two face buttons, and no headphone jack.. No thanks. I want a backlight, not an insult.
Gba > snes, can play 8 bit 16 bit 32bit now openlara ps1 tombraider
Who would have ever thought that a handheld would be more powerful than a console that came out over a decade prior. Fucking mind blowing.
If only the sound chips were superior on the GBA. I love playing R Type and Super Ghouls N Ghost on GBA but the sound omg 😬
SNES has desicated Sound Hardware, about 9 different Graphical output "Channels" and Software/Modul Chip Upgrades Like Super FX though
GBA was one of the first devices that successfully implemented the ARM architecture before smartphones.
It was interesting how back then they created 2 tracks, perhaps inadvertently where the TV game would have its run then the portable game would be very similar and they could re-release the same games all over again.
I love my GBA and GB Micro, but the hardware has one major shortcoming in my opinion: The sound. The GBA SOC has a PSG to make gameboy-like sounds, which is fine, but the 'advanced' sound is just a pair of 8-bit DAC's: No sound coprocessor, no DSP, just a pair of DACs, under direct control of the CPU. I don't think it even has a DMA.. So sampled sound requires direct CPU intervention, and a lot of it, to generate music, and its still only 8-bits per channel. Even the old Amiga 500 does a better job: it has twice as many 8-bit channels, with DMA support.
To be fair, the Amiga line always had a reputation for being great for creative (particularly audio/music) purposes. I don't think most people would produce an album on a GBA :P
Regardless, the GBA sound hardware is definitely a shortcoming, but it was still capable of genuinely beautiful and rich sound if you play to its unique strengths and work within its limitations
trying to port SNES music 1:1 is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole
It does have DMA for the 2 PCM channels, but they can only play one-shot samples (no looping). The channels also have a selectable 50% volume setting and panning flags. The panning in particular allows a mono stream to play through one of them and makes the other one free for higher-quality samples.
Oh man,.. I remember playing that Konami racing game,… it was really good.
That was the 3rd game I got for the gba. One of my f favorites.
6:19 on top of that, the GBA version of the Simpsons road rage had the ability to simulate hills with the mode 7 streets and roads.
10 years is an eternity in computer hardware development. Even more so in the 90s, when Moore's law of the doubling of computer power ever 2 years was even more than apparent.
Great video as always, I hope you get over your cold soon! I wondered if you would sneak the Open Lara port in there. Glad you did! ha
The problem with the gba was that it did not have a dedicated sound chip so sound was handled by the cpu taking away precious cpu cycles
OMG IT WAS JUST SO INSANELY POWERFUL in comparison I JUST LITERALLY SHIT MYSELF TO DEATH