Every Super Nintendo Port on the Game Boy Advance Compared (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Every Super Nintendo Port on the Game Boy Advance Compared (2020)

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69 pointstosh37 comments

You should compare the audio too, not just the graphics. Hard to compare the audio in this video.

Broadly speaking, the GBA is more capable graphically, has a better CPU, more RAM, a simpler interface to the cartridge, and the best GBA games are going to look pretty good compared to SNES games.

However, the SNES has a dedicated programmable DSP for audio, which can play eight sample tracks simultaneously. The GBA just gives you a DAC and the CPU and you do everything there. You could of course try to make up for that by relying more on PCM tracks and leaning on the larger ROM sizes, but that will only take you so far.

Here’s a track from the FFV port to GBA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSUWIxn0Ihw

Here’s the original version for SNES (edit: link fixed):

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

To my ears, the SNES one is the clear winner and it shows off the capabilities of the DSP—less aliasing noise (that weird crunchy sound you hear on the GBA version), and also has some basic effects (like a little bit of echo).

After reading your comment I had to check out the situation in the case of Donkey Kong Country, since that series has some of the most impressive SNES soundtracks in my opinion. While they did an impressive job, there is still a distinct difference between the two systems.

GBA: https://youtu.be/UlTgFb0qbxQ

SNES: https://youtu.be/_4EjGXRDOH0

edit: They added some interesting didgeridoo-like sound effects to "Forest Frenzy" though

Picked out a particular song to make the comparison easier: Gang-Plank Galleon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlTgFb0qbxQ&t=2191s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4EjGXRDOH0&t=3663s

Pretty stark difference, IMO. GBA version sounds shrill, all the note envelopes seem messed up, the variations in emphasis & phrasing in the SNES version are gone, etc. SNES version is also in stereo.

Odd, the SNES music is clearly more sophisticated but I'm pretty sure I prefer the GBA track. I don't like the sound of the SNES instruments.

But then I've also never cared for the DKC soundtrack.

You might like 'Kong in Concert', which is a series of arrangements using the DKCountry soundtrack. I was hooked on it back when it came out, apparently 17 years ago. Way to make me feel old.

https://dkcproject.ocremix.org

Your second link isn't the original SNES version, it's a remix designed to sound better. Here's the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dghlAQDQneU

I still agree that the SNES version sounds much better than the GBA version, but people shouldn't think the SNES version sounded like that remix.

Huh, you’re right. I thought something was off about the video when I listened to it. Although the version I linked calls itself a remix in the description, it sounds like someone just played a MIDI version with new samples. I’m not sure I’d even call that a remix.

It is, in an older sense, "remixed", much as some older music was remixed by taking the original sub-tracks and re-combining them in a different way with different audio levels and balance and similar. It certainly doesn't qualify in the modern usage of "novel music inspired by the original".

Maybe "remaster" is the better term here?

Apparently the "OSV" in the track title means "Original Sound Version". TIL!

The GBA is more capable graphically, true, but has a poor screen with a lower resolution (240×160 vs 256×224 for the super nes). Because of that, a few ports had to rework the sprites to fit the gba screen better. also had to modify the color palette. Animations may also have less frames.

For example, Donkey Kong Country, top is from Super Nes, bottom is from GBA. Both enlarged x4.

https://abload.de/img/dkcsnesgba4xcdjn2.png

256×224 is the resolution that the SNES renders at, but the full area was not considered usable. The exact usable area depends on the TV, but game developers would often restrict themselves to a “safe area”. With the GBA, the entire 240×160 viewing area is usable.

You're referring to differences in individual TV overscan settings. For that reason, developers were told to not use a particular area around the outside of the screen for important information. However, by the 90s, most recent TV models were accurate in their overscan settings and a lot of games included HUD info right on the edge of the screen. Developers could be fairly certain that MOST users would see all or nearly all of the 256x224 output area. Certainly far more than 160 vertical pixels. So it's not really a surprise that ports to the GBA sometimes had to work around the limited resolution.

> You're referring to differences in individual TV overscan settings.

I’m not referring to differences in overscan settings—I’m just talking about the fact that overscan exists. It’s a setting, but it’s generally not user-configurable on consumer TVs.

Even with TVs that have more accurate overscan, the TVs still have overscan, so you cannot use the entire area. The HUD goes right to the edge of the screen, but the 256×224 area continues past this. My feelings are that it is up to your judgment exactly what the safe area is, but taken for granted that it is smaller than the full picture.

Newer games and systems were still affected by this—the Nintendo 64, Xbox, PlayStation 2, etc. You could not reasonably put your HUD all the way to the edge of the framebuffer on any of these systems. Overscan only died (sort of) with the arrival of LCDs and HDMI.

> Certainly far more than 160 vertical pixels.

Yes, that would be absurd.

The "active display area" of a CRT is 224 vertical pixels - all of those pixels are intended for display. The actual number of scanlines is 240. The top 8 and bottom 8 rows of pixels are not intended for display. This is the overscan area. 90s era CRTs were generally very accurate in their overscan calibration. Although there might have been a very small range of error, generally, the intended 224 scanlines were being displayed.

I might be wrong, but it seems you are under the impression that a percent of the active display area was used for overscan. That would only occur if the TV was not calibrated correctly. That's the reason hardware manufacturers instructed developers to not put important content too close to the edge of the screen. However, developers absolutely would have assumed most TVs were displaying the active display area accurately, which is why in the 90s most games had HUDs extending to the edge of the active display.

But this is all really beside the point, because if you watch the posted video, you can see countless examples of how GBA developers had to account for the massively reduced vertical resolution. Look at the Super Mario World example - the GBA version is massively zoomed in, greatly reducing the amount of the screen that is visible.

The GBA (before the SP version) didn't have a backlight and so compared to the CTRs you played SNES games on were quite a bit darker. That's why most of these games got a brightness bump for the GBA.

You can buy a new shell and an IPS screen with adjustable brightness for $45 on ebay. I'm excited to revive my old GBA that has a terrible looking silver finish and scratched screen.

I had one at launch.

This comic accurately describes the experience:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/13/lame-boy-advan...

I remember that discourse but not really having a problem at the time. I was generally able to see the screen. But I did recently go back to playing an original GBA after years of backlit screens and it was close to unplayable.

I think it depended on the game. Games designed with very high contrast art worked well, but games that didn't make that choice upfront were painful. My favorite game on the device was Mario Kart, which was pretty hard to see.

If you had Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (one of the launch games), it was an incredibly common complaint. When the GBA SP came out some years later and I went back to "test" what CotM looked like with a backlight, it almost looked like a different game.

That game is amazing otherwise too. But yes the darkness was absurd.

That was one of the games I played. I did have a Worm Light for playing in the car but don't recall otherwise using it.

Of course, I later modded my GBA twice to make it more satisfying to play. The first added a TV out. The second was the Afterburner front light which I did not do a very good job with.

Super personal anecdote but…

I had that game, and seriously gave up on it due to the light. Then one summer at MIT they were offering some nerdy classes for high school kids and my parents let me take a couple. For whatever reason I ended up having to wait around for a long time, so I brought my GBA.

It was then I found this area with amazing natural light coming from the ceiling. And I realized I could finally play castlevania! It ended up being one of my favorite games.

Gamecube GBplayer was a godsend. Great memories of Metroid Fusion / Zero Mission. I still have my disc!

I didn’t have a SNES growing up, so the ports on the GBA were godsend for me. Other than that, developers got crazy creative with the hardware, despite its low power. Aggressive Inline had pseudo 3D and licensed soundtrack, there were cartridges with rumble, tilt and light sensors. You could use the console as a GameCube controller. I still remember playing Castlevania under the lamp in our living room (the screen of the original GBA was terribly dark) when I heard the new about 9/11. I also got a flash cart and dipped my toes into developing when I was about 15. Fond memories!

Interesting how tales of phantasia (7:43) appears to be using a completely different set of character sprites for the GBA version. That's a lot of effort for a port!

Wikipedia says that the GBA version takes things form not only the SNES version but also the Playstation version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Phantasia#Development

I have to admit, I never played any SNES ports on the original GBA. I had a SNES and by the time the GBA came out, SNES emulation was pretty good, so I'd played many of the games I didn't own already.

The only GBA SNES port I've actually played is Final Fantasy 5, mostly for the new job classes it adds. But I noticed a lot of the things shown on the video. The audio was tinny, even on an emulator, the graphics looked brighter, more washed out.

I have to say though, I never realized there were so many GBA SNES ports. I knew about the Mario ones and the final fantasy ones and a few others, but didn't realize there was actually so many ports done.

The GBA was a pretty cool system. At the time though, I never actually thought of it as a pocket SNES. A lot of the actual GBA games didn't look like snes games. Most of them had a totally different style to them and played differently. It never really occurred to me until later that it was kind of like a pocket SNES.

I know for a long time the "suggested" version of Final Fantasy 6 by the community was the GBA port on an emulator for the extra content, but with the "Restored" patch which reverted the palette to the SNES palette rather than the brightened palette which was changed to compensate for the GBA's screen.

It was amazing to see that the computing power of the SNES could be replicated in an affordable battery-powered handheld device few years later.

10 years: 1990 - 2000. But the SNES CPU was a 1982-generation design.

That's 5 + 3 doublings in density/energy efficiency under Moore's law.

And SNES was pretty low power, it didn't have or need a cooling a fan or disk drive.

Tech progress in games at that time was absolutely wild. You really get a sense of the slowdown when you compare the number of years since a milestone and the consider the milestone that number of years before.

For instance, Crysis was released in 2007, so roughly 14 years and we've achieved marginal improvements to top end graphics.

14 years before crysis Doom released in 1993...

The recent improvements have been mostly to resolution, fps, and dynamic lighting. More of just the growing pains that have significant overhead compared to the old days where 1280x720 was considered a great monitor resolution. Just look at these benchmarks from when Crysis was released, where 1080p was considered top end and 30fps on a high end GPU was considered good. 1440p has almost double the pixels to render and 4K has quadruple the pixels to render to. The nice thing is that at around 8-16k the eye can no longer distinguish a difference in higher resolutions, so at that point we can stop devoting extra GPU resources to rendering more pixels and instead focus more on the quality of those pixels.

https://www.techspot.com/article/73-crysis-performance/page5...

The captures from the SNES and GBA seem to use very different colour spaces, leaving the SNES footage looking dark and the GBA washed out, even when they use the exact same graphics. Makes them pretty hard to compare.

May also be a consequence of how the games were designed given the GBA screen.

Kind of like how sprites were often designed knowing they’d be altered by a CRT and now look too crisp on modern screens.

A lot of early GBA games are like that on purpose since there was no sidelit or backlit screen until the GBA SP came out.

It's a bit hard to do a proper end-to-end comparison when it would have also depended on what kind of TV was attached to the SNES.

You could take a photo in a well-lit room, if you can find a room with a working GBA, SNES, and CRT in it.

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