The Game Boy Advance Is Insanely Powerful Compared to the SNES

is the gameboy advance really that powerful insanely powerful well yes it is i would say so when you consider when it came out how much it cost its battery life and well just the fact that this is nintendo who we're talking about for whom raw power was not always a priority yes this was the gameboy's final form and it was a heck of a machine when it first emerged in 2001. this was originally intended to be a gba versus snazz thing but there really is no comparison the game boy advance is way way more powerful than the super nes in nearly every way nearly we'll get to its shortcomings but before that a quick word from today's sponsor pcb way yes the one and the only your one-stop shop for pcb manufacturer 3d printing cnc machining injection molding assembly all kinds of services if you're a fan of classic gaming you'll know that messing around with the original hardware is tons of fun and pcb way has your back here with a whole load of ready to go retro projects shared on its website like this gameboy advance power cleaner what on earth does that do well it gives some much needed noise reduction to the gba's sound output and you'll be surprised at just how inexpensive it is to get going with custom pcbs prices start from five dollars and with a five dollar coupon for all new users you might find your first project costs you next to nothing anyway thank you pcbway hit up that link in the description if you'd like to know more every sort of pcb imaginable could be yours for a very reasonable price that's pcb way a company that i'm always very happy to promote now back to the issue at hand the game by advance and yes i do have a cold at the moment but let's just crash on regardless the game by advance though brim full with pocket power it was never going to have the capabilities of something like the playstation it just doesn't have the 3d acceleration for a start but it was a good bit ahead of anything from the 16-bit era when it comes to computing capability no surprise then it saw a lot of snares ports and sequels and remakes of games from the 16-bit era of just a few years prior to its launch it could easily handle even the most demanding games of this type donkey kong country being one example of many the cpu at the heart of this system is an arm 7t dmi the ancestor of the processes you'll find in nearly all of today's mobile devices primitive compared to what you'd get in a modern smartphone of course but at least a couple of generations ahead of what you find in either the super nintendo or the mega drive and better in every way although capable of running in either 16 or 32-bit modes the gba spent most of its time as a 16-bit system strictly speaking because of memory bandwidth constraints but still its high clock speed and modern features meant that this cpu could do a lot i'm not going to get too bogged down in specs and numbers but the gba had the power for workloads that older systems would find impossible yoshi's island is an excellent example the snez original required the super fx chip to run basically another cpu built into the cartridge that handled things like sprite scaling and rotation but the gba could do this natively without any extra help no problem mostly the gba's lower resolution screen means that things are a little zoomed in and also a bit brighter too and higher contrast though this wasn't a technical constraint many gba games went for a lighter color palette to account for the non-backlit screen that the earlier models had there is one effect in yoshi's island that the gba seems to struggle with and that's the infamous touch fuzzy get dizzy freak out yes this is what the snazz version looks like but its appearance on the handheld version is a bit more muted why is this well the snares graphics processing system had one thing that the game boy advances lacked what was called offset per tail mode basically this allowed vertical strips of the background to be scrolled individually the gameboy advance was forced to fake this for the foreground by rather cleverly switching between two background layers set at different heights relative to yoshi they didn't really attempt to do anything at all with the other layer that swirls around on the super nes maybe they thought it was too much trouble or maybe they were just worried about the effects of flashing imagery i do believe this part was toned down on the super nes classic edition version 2 because of these concerns anyway this is a totally minor point that i only put in for accuracy's sake in every other way the gba ppu was way more capable than the snares one as many games show souped up successes to 16-bit titles it could handle four separate 256 colour backgrounds at once 128 256 color sprites up to 64 by 64 pixels with 30 of them able to be rotated and scaled you can easily fill up the entire screen with sprites without flicker it can also rotate and scale backgrounds like the snares mode 7 but more so a fine transformation is the technical name for this type of thing and the gba could have either two separates are fine layers at once or one a fine layer and three normal backgrounds this means you could have stuff like what we see here in konami crazy races with a rotating background over the top of another layer we can see beneath it it could even go one stage further and add some transparency effects like in this totally not rainbow road inspired course appearing translucent over the spacey background you really could not do this on the snazz no way mode 7 is much more limited another thing the super nes couldn't do are these 3d worlds in sonic battle the under loved sonic fighting game here we've got two affine layers acting in tandem one for the floor and one for the tops of the obstacles in the arena whilst the walls are done with scaled sprites and it looks quite nice it also nicely brings us to the whole world of 3d something that the gba was not really made for but ended up doing quite a lot of first off let's talk doom it seemed quite impressive when it appeared on the super nes in 1995 and impossible ports made possible by the super fx chip once again or i should say the more powerful super fx 2 it wasn't the best version of doom not by a long way it was sort of playable and well not bad compared to most other attempts to bring this type of game to 16-bit machines but not that great either six years later the gba version well it's also far from perfect but it is better it's fully textured the snes version was missing the ceiling it runs better and the monsters aren't always facing you either it might not satisfy hardcore doom enthusiasts there's probably still some out there but for the first portable version of doom it's not bad okay if you had very deep pockets literally as well as figuratively you might have already seen doom on some sort of palm top pc or pda but not one that's quite easily literally fit in your pocket cost 80 quid and ran for 15 hours on two aaa's yes it was a minor miracle to see this running on this back then but there is so much more we could look at moving on to a polygonal 3d as opposed to the ray casting of doom well let's have a look at star fox 2 on the snares for comparison's sake it didn't officially come out till 2017 on the snares classic of course though the beta leaked years before it is though the best proper 3d game for the system no question it even has rudimentary texture mapping again this uses the super fx2 to actually draw the 3d graphics and welding frame rate isn't great but it is a totally playable game sadly this was never ported to the gba that would have been great wouldn't it but no but can the gba match it in performance though oh yes absolutely the problem is where to start well let's bring out the big guns right away and go straight for driver 3. is this a good game to play not really but technically wow this is a full-on 3d open-world action game on the gameboy advance yeah the frame rate is low the graphics pop-in is ludicrously high the textures are wonky but well wow a real open world game on a handheld console that came out in 2001 and cost a hundred dollars you can pay that much for a controller these days [Music] from here there's a huge list of games doing stuff in 3d that the snazzer and any other 16-bit system would never be able to cope with at all no matter what we're in a different league now asterix and obelix xxl is a 3d platforming brawler set in fairly large environments featuring who else but those ancient goalish rome resistance fighters if you really squint it could almost be a playstation game but you would have to squint a lot yeah it's not spyro the dragon it's certainly not banjo-kazooie but it is amazingly ambitious i can't believe they pulled it off on this system more or less v-rally 3 is another one a full-on polygonal 3d rally game it doesn't match what you'd see in a real fault for that 32-bit home system but damn once again this is impressive for such a restricted system especially considering how well well let's say modest the previous entry in the game boy line had been the game boy color wasn't much more than a minor bump from the original gameboy and was left behind by the competition technically though it still had insane success of course this here is duke nukem on the gameboy color and this is duke nukem on the gameboy advanced three years later it really is a world away isn't it but if you really want to see some crazy impressive stuff well maybe we should talk about emulation because well the gba was just about viable as a portable emulation system it could run a few emulators let's say acceptably well well enough to be enjoyable even today if you don't have too high expectations and going back to the early 2000s this capability was pretty jaw-droppingly unprecedented nes emulation thanks to pocket nes is not flawless but it's got very high compatibility and a large number of games run pretty nicely yes you can enjoy games like crisis force and river city ransom in a pretty decently playable form the big problem is resolution mismatch the gba's screen resolution doesn't fit well with the nes's it's got to be squashed or scaled or something a bit of experimentation with the settings though and most games can look okay what else can we emulate well how about the game boy with goomba color wouldn't that be totally pointless though given that the gba has full game boy compatibility built in well no for a few reasons first off not all game boy advanced models actually have original game boy compatibility the game boy micro didn't and this allows you to play these games on that system also it allows you to run game boy rum files off a standard gba flash card something that would otherwise be impossible and you can have all the benefits of emulation like safe states not only that you can even enable some super game boy features compatibility still isn't totally perfect some game boy colour games won't work properly but this works even better than nes emulation no scaling needed to fit things in but we can go even further than that dr sms gives us a pretty respectable sega master system emulation too allowing a reasonable recreation of sonic and all those other classics it won't make you chuck out your game gear but not bad at all for the early 2000s there really wasn't much else at all that could even begin to do this back then and this stuff was available then if you had a flash cart i'm not just looking at recent homebrew developments these are emulators that came out when the gba was still on the market and i remember enjoying them all myself way back then with my own gpa things do go downhill from here though as we try to emulate more powerful systems the pc engine is kind of sort of playable with some games but far from an ideal experience it does have sound but you're better off without it really and switching it off improves performance still though i'm amazed that this is even remotely possible i couldn't say the same about the gba's attempts to emulate the competition too or what passed for competition in this utterly nintendo dominated field then as now in japan nintendo's portable system faced off against the neo geo pocket and the bandai wonder swan and well my word the gba can sort of emulate both of them this is the neo geo pocket and it is the best of the two though you wouldn't want to play any games this way really but it just goes to show how powerful the game boy advance was compared to what came before this goes double for the wonders one the few compatible games run glacially but as a proof of concept it is impressive just imagine if somebody today released a handheld that could emulate the switch that definitely hasn't happened though that would make nintendo sad and they'd probably have to allegedly resort to shutting down youtube videos that talk about it anyway there's one last emulator that i want to look at and well here it is it's the super nes indeed it's a little bit glitchy i will warrant it but from the fact that the game boy advance has fewer buttons than the super nes there's a few other things you might complain about if you're a super nintendo purist you might notice something amiss here and there but hey it is running yeah emulating donkey kong country is well more than a little bit silly as there's already a perfectly good port of it on the system but this emulator doesn't run that many games and this is one of the better looking ones believe it or not this absolutely seals the deal though about how they compare in terms of power if the game boy advance can emulate the super nintendo even a bit it's just got to be more powerful that's the way things are to emulate a system you need to convert the game or program's binary code from the original into something the host system can execute in real time on the fly and this adds an overhead that you can only really overcome with more computing power so that's it this is why there is no comparison between the super nintendo and the game boy advance one can sort of emulate the other but there is one other fly in the ointment we probably need to talk about there is i'm afraid to say no sound on this emulator is there yes this is i'm sure you'll agree complete silence you probably would have taken my word for that but anyway this is one area of the snazzy's capabilities that the gameboy advance will never be able to fully recreate not completely it can do better than silence as the many official super nes ports show but it can't sound quite as good why is that well to break it down both systems use sample based pcm audio processors the difference is in the quality the super nes plays back audio with a sample rate of 32 kilohertz and a bit depth of 16 bits the game boy advance also has a sample rate of 32 kilohertz but a bit depth of just 8 bits now this isn't quite the same thing as 8-bit and 16-bit processors but if you're thinking that 16 bits is better than 8-bits well then you're on the right lines what you are hearing right now is drops down into 32 kilohertz 16-bit audio like what the super nes has in my editing software you probably can't hear much if any difference from the usual audio quality this though is what it sounds like in 8-bit game boy advance audio quality yes it's noticeably worse isn't it in fact it's pretty awful let's go back to normal shall we to really simplify things bit depth has an impact on the signal-to-noise ratio an 8-bit sampled audio is never going to sound as good as 16-bit sampled audio other things being equal and for the game by advance it's often even worse than this you see the system unlike the super nes didn't have its own dedicated audio processor a lot of the work has to be done by the main cpu so many games dropped the audio quality even further to stop it impacting the frame rate there's more to this story that i'm leaving out but if you think the game boy advance sounds worse than the snares then you aren't wrong and this is a big reason why the gba had enough space in its cartridges and just enough processing power to simply play back loops of pre-recorded audio in sort of okay quality which many games did because that's the easiest option this led many game soundtracks to be just tinny snippets repeating endlessly like the awful thing that this otherwise technically impressive game smashing drive produces add on top of this the crappy speaker and the electrical noise the system generates and well it doesn't add up to great audio even if you use headphones but outside of this sound quality issue and outside of minor points like the offset per tile stuff and the okay not totally minor but not huge point of lower screen resolution the game boy advance absolutely smashes the super nintendo here is yet motor proof this is jim bagley's virtua fighter clone demo it's far from a complete game but wow it's even got some lighting effects in the form of garage shading this is the same guy who ported dragon's lair to the zx81 so he's got form but anyway moving on i should also mention for completion's sake doom haven't we already seen this well we have sort of but this is a new attempt to bring it to the game boy advance actually a port of the pr boom open source doom engine it brings even more features of doom to the game boy advance and runs a bit better too i will put a link in the description to the project page and finally how on earth could i leave this out to this huge recent development in gba wonderment a port of open lara the open source tomb raider engine yeah this is still just an alpha version but well this really is something else in the past you might have said a lot of gameboy advanced games were competing for the crown of the best looking 3d title on the console but this one easily cruises into first place it looks absolutely superb doesn't it it's even got a handy frame counter to let us know that the frame rate is actually quite decent too at least for a 3d game boy advanced game it's a fully textured 3d world with lighting and a reasonable draw distance and if this doesn't prove the potential power of nintendo's the last of the game boy line well i don't know what will so that's the gba more powerful than the super nes absolutely it is in classic style 2d gaming or in 3d it beats nintendo's 16-bit system by a long way and it manages to be a real mini beast that still somehow had amazing battery life and a genuinely pocket form factor no matter which version of the hardware you had the system's life was really quite short at least it's life as nintendo's flagship handheld being replaced by the ds after just three years maybe we never saw it being pushed just as hard as it could have been with new hardware taking its place so quickly it's enjoyed quite a big homebrew following over the years quite a bit of stuff has come out for it as we've seen but i can't help but think even this has been rained in a bit by the popularity of the psp's homebrew scene the bsp really took over as the major hub for handheld homebrew software very quickly of course more powerful systems soon came along the nokia engage took the crown as the most powerful handheld just two years later but to be fair that was awful and it was three times the price but then of course the ds happened and well that's just another story entirely so anyway that's the end of that another 20 minutes of your life gone wasted listening to me waffle on with a cold at this time but well i enjoyed it even if you didn't thanks as ever tonight really wonderful patreons if you would like to be numbered amongst them that really would be fantastic there's a link below and i will say thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time folks do you

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 170,098

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Id: CCXlwI939is

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Apprehensive-Bus6676]

GBA's biggest issue is its audio. So you would get good ports of SNES games with much worse music and sound. For a long time, the best version of FF6 was a modded GBA ROM with the original music.

[u/The_Multifarious]

Not a big surprise, there are 11 years between their release. The Switch is also significantly more powerful than the Wii, and technology moved significantly faster than that in the 90s.

Although what truly stands out for me was the ridiculously good battery life on that thing and the DS too. It completely blows everything that came before and after out of the water. Battery life in mobile consoles peaked with these two systems, and (barring any revolutions in battery technology) I doubt we're ever getting a mobile game console like that ever again.

[u/Noellevanious]

The Gameboy Advance is such an impressive little system that sadly didn't really see its potential realized outside of some third-party games. It's probably partly why the homebrew scene for it is so big - the things it can pull off are insanely impressive. The DS was also incredibly impressive, but its massive success enabled a lot of potential.

It's why I can understand it and the PSP becoming such hot commodities a decade+ after their releases. You can't really appreciate how impressive those little machines were until you think about how, in the span of 10 years, portable gaming went from basic platformers, RPGs, and puzzle games on a budget 4-tone screen with the Gameboy, to games that almost perfectly mirrored the SNES in power, graphics, and gameplay, and within 10 years we went from the PSX, this clunky box with at the time revolutionary 3D graphics, to a handheld system small enough to fit in a fanny pack or sweatshirt pocket, that could perfectly play those PSX games.