Interestingly, GBA development was the only place I still saw Amigas being used in the games industry by 2003. DPaint IV on an A1200 was still the weapon of choice for many pixel artists working on games for GBA, even 10 years after Commodore's demise.
SNES resolution quoted is wrong. 99.9% of the SNES library is rendered in 256x224. The SNES can only use 512x448 resolution in 2 background layers, one at 16 colors max and the other at 8 colors max. Since it can only be used in background layers that basically means all actual sprites will still be low res (256x224) This is the reason why the only SNES game to ever use this mode in-game is RPM, and as explained before only the background is "hi-res" and all other sprites like the cars are low res, so it is not a full hi-res mode. The only other few games that ever used it like Seikendensetsu 3 only used it in menus.
but by my recolectence, I believe snes still beats gens games in rez 2-1. but then I'm using emulation and "super eagle mode" was not standard on base snes models I don't think
Steve Benway The SP is really unergonomic though. I had a original GBA with an afterburner display light built in. (The same front light they built into the sp). But it got stolen from me. After that I bought an SP but playing mario kart or anything that used the shoulder buttons much just isn't fun on that.
Same. It was my first game system. Don't have my original SP any more but I did buy a used SP from a thrift store for about $20 in January 2017. It is the 001 version but it is still great
GBA SP cramped my fingers after long play sessions from the buttons being recessed and small. The original GBA felt the best and I currently own a backlit one with rechargeable batteries.
In the year Y2K, GBA is cutting edge. At that time, cellphone screens were white and black. You couldn't find out many pocket devices with the ability to show colorful pictures. The screen of GBA is TFT with relatively low ghost images. The reflect screen is all for saving batteries. A couple of 900 mah AA batteries can support GBA running smoothly as much as 9 hours. This is the same time as Panasonic portable CD player can do.
The ARM processor was not cut down nor did it take more operations to do the same things as the 6502 descendant in the SNES. Actually, most games simply just did not use very much of the power of the ARM chip. There's a lot of homebrew and demos that use the chip to its fullest extent and can do quite a bit more, including realtime 3D graphics. It probably is significantly more powerful than a SNES with any of the special chips they ever shipped with. My guess for the real reason why games were usually not so advanced was probably twofold: 1, the SNES ports just didn't need it anyways, and 2, battery life can be significantly improved by not maxing out the CPU.
The fact he uses mode 6 to define the SNES's screen resolution (only appearance: RPM Racing and some menus), gives away the fact he has no bloody idea what he's rambling on about. High resolution mode doesn't even apply to sprites. And you're not going to get a full color range. He also doesn't know anything about the 8-bit databus, or the SNES wasting resources thanks to the limit of two sprite tile sizes per screen. Among many, many other issues. If he thinks the SNES could run Gunstar Superheroes - or even that so-so port of Space Harrier - then it's impossible to take him seriously.
Yeah, basically GBA was the first handheld powerful enough to process SNES games, even though it may even seem like an overkill. GB Color just wasn't capable of this. And Nintendo actually made a good move to port these games because they were good entries for people born after the SNES era and for those who grew up with SNES they were great too becaue there is so no problem in playing them again a generation or two later. Not everything needed to be in 3D after all.
It doesn't make sense to call the ARM "more bare to the bones" compared to the 65c816 compatible CPU in the SNES. You definitely don't need as many instructions (or cycles) to get things done in ARM7 as you would with the Ricoh CPU. 65c816 lacks things like hardware multiplication, multiply-accumulate, barrel roll/shift. Moreover its registers and bus are smaller, there are fewer registers altogether, and they are non-orthogonal in that arithmetic operations can only be performed on the single accumulator register, and indexed load/stores can only be performed using the two index registers. At the same clock speed, the ARM7 in the GBA would run circles around the Ricoh CPU, and it would be much more pleasant (but not necessarily as fun!) to write assembler code for it.
< and > meaning you like it better? That's fine, you're allowed your opinion, but it's not much of a way to start a conversation. Somebody else could go "GB < Color TV Game 6" in reply, but it wouldn't be terribly satisfying. You should probably use sentences, and put forward a more detailed opinion, if you want to start a debate. Otherwise this is just a list of things some guy likes better than other things. There's not a lot somebody can actually do with it.
I don't think so... For me, in terms of processing (RELATIVE comparison), it would be like: NES > Color TV game 6 GB > NES GBC > GB SNES > GBC Virtual Boy > SNES GBA > Virtual Boy NDS > NGBA NGC > DS Wii > GC ON3DS > Wii NN3DS > N3DS Wii U > N3DS NSwicth > Wii U
Nintendo has been doing great as of late, the 3ds was fantastic and the switch is as well. But back when the gba and gamecube were around they were kicking ass! I loved the games and systems i had from nintendo at the time. While most of my nostalgia is from before the gba, it still holds so many memories for me. Cool video.
@@deletedaccount3187 yea you would think the gba would have better audio but unlike the snes they didn't plan on anyone hooking it up to nicer speakers. Same with the resolution. Snes is clearer on the big screen.
Thx for the correction. This mobile keyboard's keys are pretty small. The phone I use is a Samsung Galaxy A5. But meh idc since my comment is 8 months old.
Technically RISC processor like ARM was at this point already more 'advanced' and had more instructions than 6502 derivative found in SNES. GBA did have to do more CPU processing than SNES but not because of RISC processor but because of GBA lacking sound chip (SNES could play music with 0% speed penalty to the rest of the system) and maybe fancy graphics functions. Though I am not sure about the latter. It would make sense to simplify graphics chip and focus on bitmap modes accelerating copy operations (something like Amiga's blitter) rather than create tile based video modes
yet GBA ports of SNES games looked washed out and sounded terrible.... Not to mention even Sega Genesis ports of games on the GBA also looked and sounded like shit.
Hipster Black Metal It does though, when you consider that the aspect ratio on the GBA is different than a TV screen. Could they have altered it so that it didn't look stretched? Sure, but why spend more money on a port than you have to? They already put in plenty of extra content.
Search: Area 1 - Rainbow Route - Kirby & The Amazing Mirror Music Extended. Or: Castlevania Aria Of Sorrow - Heart Of Fire (Extended). Or: Fire Emblem: Rekka No Ken Soundtrack: Fire Emblem Theme One of the best.
GBA is like a portable Sega 32x imo, although, GBA is more powerful than the 32x because it didn't had the framebuffer limitations like the software rendering of the 32x, and can push to 45000 polys at 20 fps (a Formula 1 demo pushed early PS1 graphics).
it may be overall technically better than the snes, BUT because of the lower resolution and the lower sound quality or, to be fair, the sounds we ear, i VERY much prefer SNES without any question. The versions snes/gba that i tested, i can't even describe how much differences there are. They are too much different, AT LEAST, again to be fair, the final result of the game version. Maybe with more developers dedication the gba versions could do better, but in reality, the final product isn't better than the snes versions...at all!
Before its release, I wanted so much for the GBA to be a portable SNES, and I was really disappointed when they released it with only 2 face buttons. And when you watch a direct comparison, the difference in sound is pretty jarring. I understand the resolution being lower, since it's a tiny portable screen, but why the hell is the sound so bad compared to hardware from 10 years earlier?
As a programmer, I would say that the Specs of the GBA are superior by 2 things: 1.- Has more processor power, but the games rarely uses it because the GBA doesnt have the espace to cool down the processor as the SNES had. It is the same with smarthphones. They have multi-core processor capable of runnning at speeds more than 1ghz, but they never reach that, otherwise they will burn themselves. 2.- the more Vram and RAM compensates the lack of processor power, so that's why it can handle more code to make it run an Engine capable of 3D graphics, or other cool special effects like mode - 7, etc. Love your videos, anyway
To be honest I never owned a GBA but I don't remember thinking it was behind the times even though I thought it was essentially a SNES. The Gameboy Color released in 1998 and was the equivalent of like a C64 if that.
As somebody with a degree in computer engineering, I have to point out that your technical talk about the ARM7 vs the cut down WDC 65C816 in the SNES is just *complete* rubbish. Both the ARM7 CPU in the GBA and the WDC chip the SNES CPU is based on were designed with the RISC philosophy of having few, but very fast instructions. In terms of what instructions they implement, the biggest difference between the two is that the GBA CPU has 32 bit instructions and a smaller 16 bit instruction set it can use while the SNES CPU has only the 16 bit mode originally found in the 65C816.
The 65816 in the SNES is not a RISC: - RISC cpus have large register files - 16 or 32 registers (or at least 8 like SuperH) - RISC cpus have large 32bit or 64bit registers - RISC cpus only have 8bit or 16bit instructions for loading/storing data - RISC cpus have no partial flag register updates (either no flags at all, or only update when requested) - RISC cpus have a fast instruction memory with a wide bus (either instruction cache, or the GBA's 32k fast RAM) - RISC cpus lack segment/page/bank registers and rely on flat addressing with large 32/64bit addresses - RISC cpus lack load-modify and load-modify-store instructions (and other similar hard-to-pipeline instructions) - RISC cpus have 3 register operand instructions (2 inputs, and a separate destination output)
Having a RISC instruction set is not actually a detriment to the CPU: it's more of a detriment for the RAM. Having simple instructions also means that you can complete them in one clock cycle, whereas complex instructions need more cycles, though they use less system memory since they are programmed in the CPU.
The thing about Nintendo is they always used older hardware on their handholds, but they always were cheaper than the competition and had a decent battery life. The Atari Lynx was prohibitively expensive and had a pathetic battery life. Unlike the competition, Nintendo understood that the portal market needed to be portable. Cutting edge graphics on a portable aren't worth your time if you need to be tethered to a plug.
Your channel (this video specifically) was on my recommended list so I thought I'd check it out. I thought maybe you were saying they were the same because they had a similar library. I didn't understand why someone would think they had the same hardware, when it's been pretty common knowledge for a long time that that isn't the case.
This is the Internet and this video was easy to watch, so what's your point? Besides, he didn't just say that they're different hardware, he explained what this means and how it was done. Perfectly good RU-vid/internet content, not sure why there's any fuss about that.
There are two issues a dedicated handheld must face that a home system can ignore. Battery life and size. It was difficult to justify a portable game system that couldn't function as a 'portable' for very long or very well. It can be argued that these attitudes have shifted and gaming habits have changed. People are relatively more willing to bring bigger devices with them now. And smartphones have long since beaten down out battery life expectations.
You clearly don't understand RISC processors, yes a RISC processor such as the ARM has a simplified instruction set compared to the likes of the 680000 or 80x86 families BUT the instructions complete in 1 or 2 clock cycles as opposed to the 50+ clock cycles of say the Intel. Therefore the likes of ARM can show a clean pair of heels for tasks such as 2D games. The 6502 was essentially a 8 bit RISC processor (simple instructions carried out quickly) where as the Z80 (for example) carried out more complex instructions (but slower.) Even Intel essentially build RISC processors that emulate the old x86 instruction set As for the NES being similar to a Gameboy, nope fraid not the NES had essentially a 6502 and the Gameboy had a 8080 with the Z80 bitwise operations grafted in (video and sound hardware where also different)
For me, the rule of thumb was that Nintendo handheld consoles were a little better than the home console from 2 generations ago, except for the lower screen resolution.
The audio DSP should be mentioned too.. I think it was better quality (especially reverb) on the SNES, but it was also done in hardware. The DSP chip was made by Sony.
Just a Snes? We are talking about the early 2000's. Maybe you don't remember, but having a handheld portable system capable of running Snes games was a big deal back then. Today it means nothing tough. You gotta understand the context.
I would say that the GBA was a powerhouse of the time compare to the very low power demand. It was relised during the time of the first color PDA and smart phones that drank battery. While the GBA was both powerfull and very power efficient. What really sticks the GBA a side to SNES is that it got quite a lot of ram. Aditionally the processor is really quite a bit more powerfull. True, the GBA is a RISC and the SNES is not. But its only half the trouth. The GBA have a 32 bit CPU while the SNES only have 16 bit. Also the difference from a RISC to a CISC is not that big, usually 30-40% So the GBA is not only more power full than the SNES; its ALOT more powerful. Its rather compatible to the PS1 rather than the SNES. The issue why the GBA need that power is that it have no coprocesor. It makes everything in software.
While technically true, the 512x448 resolution of the snes is only available through Mode 5 which puts a lot of restrictions on colors and layer usage. Almost no game use it, and when it's used it's mostly for still images. 256x224 would be the more correct resolution since that's what pretty much every game used. Aside from that, this was a pretty cool video :)
All you got to do is look at games like Top Gear Rally, Wing Commander Prophecy, and Smashing Drive to see that the GBA was more capable then the SNES.
The screen on the original GBA had no sort of backlight, it was so hard to see that many SNES ports actually brightened the sprites up so that you could see what was going on, which had the unfortunate side effect of making those games look incredibly washed out compared to their SNES counterparts. Also of note is how much better the SNES sound chip was, it had a custom sony chip that was leaps and bounds better than what the GBA could do. Great video regardless though.
But what about later models of the GBA like the two different production models of the SP and the GBA micro? Not trying debate anything, I was curious and wish you continued on with information on those as well.
With the fact of Super Mario 64, and Diddy Kong Racing on it. I have to say yes. Plus the weird thing is that Diddy Kong Racing DS looks very identical to the N64 version. Most 3D games on the DS are rendered in low Polygons, same with the N64
Well, let's do this like in the video. Using Wikipedia, I found some specs for both systems as shown below: DS: - There were two processors, both were RISC ARM. One was the ARM946E-S, featuring a clock speed of 67 MHz. This was used for video rendering and stuff done in the actual game (quite a task for a little ARM!). The other CPU was an ARM7TDMI coprocessor, used for background things like sound output and WI-FI. 33 MHz clock. - The system had 4 MB of somehow expandable RAM. N64: - This system had a special GPU along with it's CPU. The CPU was a 64-bit NEC VR4300 that could perform 93.75 MFLOPS. The GPU had a slightly slower clockrate, but could perform over 100 MFLOPS. The GPU did most of the rendering. - Without the Expansion Pak, this system housed 4 MB of RAM. It seems that the DS was very similar to the N64. They came with the same amount of RAM (give or take for expansions in cartridges). The N64 only had to take care of the game that it was running, while the DS had to manage both the game and the OS running in the background. Also, like the GBA the DS had a RISC chip, which cut down on the variety of CPU instructions with the drawback of requiring more instructions do do stuff. The memory was the same on each of the systems, but know that the RISC processor needed more instructions. Instructions are saved in memory to be ran by system relative to the program counter (assembly stuff), so this means that the DS required more instructions for a task, but had the same amount of memory as the N64. Also note that the DS had to output to a WI-FI channel, two screens, and it's sound. It also had to listen to every pixel on the bottom of the screen. With all this in mind, the N64 may have been more powerful than the DS!
The nintendo DS also has a custom 3D engine on it, of course just the ARM9 wouldn't be enough. Dispatching the frames is different from renering it. Both the MIPS processor on N64 and the ARM9 on the DS were RISC processors. Also, any popular processor past ~1995 is either full RISC or internally RISC, even the "CISC" desktop ones have a "fetch and decode" unit to translate the legacy CISC x86 operations intro micro-operations. But on the end the n64 was probably a more powerful machine.
JewNachos Well, we can all be honest and say that most of the consoles Nintendo sells are, compared to the other companies' consoles, potatoes. While the X Box 360 had a tri-core processor that clocked in at 3.6 GHz, the Wii had a main processor that clocked in at 729 MHz. With 88 MB of main memory, the Wii also didn't come close to the 512 MB ram of the X Box 360. Note, the 360 came out about a year before the Wii.
RISC doesn't mean that it's less powerful than their more complex friends. CISC will sometimes take multiple cycles to execute single complex instructions. ARM is significantly less powerful than the Intel of today, but that isn't because of RISC. I'm not sure how the other chips on old consoles compare to the ARM of that era, but still.
Better specs all around? Perhaps. But one of those specs _definitely_ was not the sound capabilities. SNES music may seem like only a slight step above generic Microsoft GS Wavetable synth, but even that was a treat to the ears compared to GBA music, which seemed to be perpetually depressed as it couldn't stop 'sighing' when it had to output the least bit of treble.
I still have two SNES machines. One has a busted power jack that if you touch will reset the console, but they both work and I keep the one with the broken jack for parts, since Nintendo can no longer supply spares. My GBA has long sense died but I do have a Color and the original DS so I can still play all the games the GBA played.
"Original Game Boy was comparable to the NES" I'd say the Game Boy barely had the chops of a ZX Spectrum. The NES was a solid generation or two ahead of it every level except sound capability. And the GBA *was* pretty much a handheld Snes - but only in terms of the design language many of its titles and ports used. I don't think there's a ton of titles on it that show off what the machine could really do but Gunstar Super Heroes might be one of them.
No, it's quite a bit more powerful than the SNES, and had far more scaling/rotation abilities. The SNES mode 7 could only scale/rotate 1 background layer. The GBA can do not only the background layer, but sprites and foreground layers too. That said...the SNES had a MUCH better sound processor.
most of the washed out colors in SNES ports aren't any actual limitation of the hardware, they're just an attempt to compensate for the relatively low visibility of the original GBA's screen. imo the GBA has the most powerful PPU designed along the NES/SNES/Genesis in any home console ever released. (i would say most powerful 2D PPU, but in my opinion that title goes to the PS1's)
I saw a lot of games on the Advance that would have no hope of playing on the Snes. Either way, Nintendo always got the handheld priorities right... they seem to be equally games and battery power, with everything else being secondary. My first was the Gamegear which, in almost every way, was superior to the Gameboy.... but it had no battery life.
Hell, Mode 7 is one of the most revolutionary graphics features ever implemented; why not use it? That being said, the Game Boy Advance certainly beats out the SNES, which I never once questioned. It has better graphics and way better sound, or have you never plugged in a set of headphones into a GBA? Yeah, 'nuff said.
Nintendo usually aimed for battery life in their consoles over performance. Yeah you had the lynx, portable turbo graphics 16, game gear then nomad, but all of those drained batteries like crazy, which is why nintendo was still using a greyscale screen. I think the power of the gba is fine for the time it came out. The biggest annoyance I have though with nintendo protables, including the DS, is the low ass resolution. By the time the 3ds came out, the low resolutions they are still using is unacceptable. Atleast include a better screen, developers would still have the option to use lower resolution modes if they wanted.
And the Switch is in HD, and drains batteries like fuck That's why I turn brightness down to so low, that it's practically OG GBA screen dark. Feels like I'm playing on GBA again
also i think the handheld market is something parents will consider for their children as its cheaper than a console so if you have a choice between a 3ds and and a vita you are going to get them the 3ds. the lynx and the Sony handhelds where just too expensive and the Sony ones are not child friendly.
Technical specs mean nothing just look at the games and how they are presented. Look at the state of Crazy Taxi and Doom on the GBA, not many would chose to play those games on that hardware. I'd say Mario Kart looks much better on the Snes than on the GBA for a comparison. The real question should be would you rather have and play on a Snes or a GBA? I think the Snes would be most people's choice every time.
Some games still looked inferior to that of the SNES. Primarily DKC series. Though that's more to do with the lightning of the screen. And lets not even go into the sound issues.
At the time of the advance and Gamecube Nintendo was st it's best with hardware. Sure, the first Xbox did have more powerful specs tha the cube. However, the Gamecube had some really interesting graphic effects that just were not present in the ps2 or Xbox. Look at the Resident evil remake for a good example, I could look it up if anyone's interested. I read the tech specs on it awhile back
It felt like most of the games were from, or at least felt like SNES games, especially PKMN Ruby/sapphire/emerald My all time fav was Puzzle league/ Dr. mario, and it had themes from the original panel de pon/ tetris attack
The game boy advance it's a 32 bit console capable To display incredible 3d graphics, (some games look like Early 3d Games for The first playstation). 007 NIGHTFIRE and STREET RACING SINDYCATE are tecnically VERY impressive !!!
No shit, Chrono Trigger is a testament to this. It's kind of uneblievable it actually achieved such graphical refinement with that kind of supposedly limited hardware.
Spoilers: No Actually, pretty much everything in this video is wrong. GBA was far more powerful than SNES, and it didn't get "eaten up" because "teh arm" or "teh 3D". It allowed for fast and dirty SNES ports that performed the same or better, software rendering that could outpace SNES hardware accelerated rendering effects and a host of on-board coprocessors combined, and also running sound, which was sequenced entirely by the SPC700 on SNES, but handled entirely in software on GBA. The reason games look similar? Because both use low resolution 2D sprites with limited hardware transparency. That is the entire story. They look similar because they were designed to look similar, not because *buzzwords*.
Nostalgia Nerd The video strongly implies risc is inherently inferior, and that having 3D capability takes performance from other areas by virtue of it's existence. There's a bunch of other shit, too, but eh
I agree with alkafrazin here, the gba being a "portable snes" is just a myth, it's a wildly different platform (by comparison, snes and megadrive are much closer than snes and gba) and the snes ports are not even "ports", you had to rewrite the entire thing. This video is like "Was the atari lynx just a commodore 64?" and is full of uninformed factoids even if it draws the (obvious) conclusion at the end
When he started talking bollocks about RISC I cringed. I wish people wouldn't release videos about hardware when they have limited understanding of how it works.
Well, the SNES absolutely reams the GBA in terms of sound quality. There's just no comparison, even when you have proper speakers or headphones hooked into it with games that had the option to take advantage of the better hardware it still couldn't compete. The cruddy resolution also hurt it quite a bit making either the screen feel cramped, or everything looking way too small and low res. In terms of straight power though? I thought it was obvious the GBA was much more capable if you could handle it right. Nothing on the SNES could come close to F-Zero Climax in terms of sheer technical capability, and the GBA had a fully working version of Yoshi's Island and a port of Doom without the Super FX 2 chip, and Doom ran significantly better to boot. Also the two Metroid titles run much faster than Super Metroid and can throw quite a bit more effects on screen with nary a frame of slowdown, and Mario Kart has a much more impressive rotational effect and better scaling than the SNES title's Mode 7.
Honestly, I believe the sound system on the GBA is better than the SNES sound chip in a lot of ways. It's the GBA's native speakers that gets all the flack. It plays them on an 8-bit depth stream, making them sound kind of crusty, especially when playing quieter sounds. However, I kind of like that funky crispiness. It's a little thing that just makes the GBA more appealing to me.
This is why the 'remixed' versions of DKC's soundtracks got so much flack, but you can't expect exact emulation from something that barely handled stereo sound, the GBA SP only had one tweeter driver. Try playing bass on something that small, it's not made to play a whole spectrum of sounds.
the GBA's sound DAC also requires more of the CPU's attention (the SNES's SPC700 APU has its own built in processor and requires ZERO interaction with the CPU - completely brilliant) which further eats into the GBA's theoretical CPU speed advantage.
Well, actually its even worse than all of that. The super nintendo audio consists of 8 wave channels that can be configured to play at any speed and added a plethora of special effects. So you can get the sound of a piano note being pressed for example and replay it into different custom speeds to make all the notes, which is how snes composes its songs. Now on GBA you only have two audio channels, left and right, and those audio channels only work at certain fixed speeds, so to make snes like audio, you have to use the CPU to basically emulate what the snes does with its audio, or you can alternatively get this bigass audio file and tell the GBA to play it all at once, like redbook audio. The second option have ZERO impact on the CPU, as its the DMA unit that copies off the music out of the cartridge and sends off to the DAC, but as its implied, makes the songs huge on the ROM, which made developers that used this trick to store the songs in very, very low Khz rate, making it sound like if was recorded from an ancient dial phone being flushed. The first option requires a lot more of CPU time, but get better results, but not as good as the snes because to work at the same rate etc would murder the CPU hard, so generally the games mixed the audio at around 12-16Khz instead of the 32Khz of snes. But well, the engines they used don't get exactly to "eat the whole CPU advantage", or well, yoshi island would not be a thing on GBA, or the 3D games it have (although i suspect most of those used the streamed audio method, thus why they have so shitty short muffled audio loops).
And the GBA's sound is even worse then the amiga, which had 4 8 bit channels in 1985. I wonder what nintendo was thinking to cheap out on the GBA's sound harware.
+dykodesigns2yt The really sad thing to me is they could have even just given it a modified 2A03 (think like Konami's VRC6) with one 16-bit sample channel and a bunch of wave generators and been in better shape.
I always felt that the Gameboy Advance was a very good design for its time. Using the example of the Lynx for instance: yes it was a color, 16-bit system in the late '80s/early '90s - but that design choice had serious limitations. The color screens of the time had to be backlit. Colors tended to be washed out, and in sunlight they were flat-out hopeless. And the relatively high specs of the unit meant that it was huge compared to the (already quite large) Game Boy, and burned through batteries like mad. While the Game Boy's screen had its limitations, it could be played in a variety of lighting conditions. GBA arrived at a point where color screens had matured a bit. Like the old Game Boy, it wouldn't work in darker environments, but in bright environments those screens performed extremely well. The system was compact for its time, and had good battery life. It wasn't a super-powerful system, but the balance between what it could do vs. how long it could do it was very good for the time. That, to me, is one of the best things a portable device can achieve. Battery life is very important to portables, because they're useless when the power runs out. Striking a good balance based on the available technology of the time is more useful than making a more powerful device that compromises that balance.
This is insane misinformation regarding RISC chips. They are characterised by a load/store architecture, and if you were to look at an ARM7 it actually has a much more complex instruction set than a 65C02.
Agreed. Wikipedia says the 6502 has 56 instructions and this ARM documentation I found lists ARMv4 thumb instructions at 42. There seem to be at least twice as many in 486, which is about the same era and around the time the CISC vs RISC battle took place. Now x86 processors ARE RISC internally with a translation that occurs on the chip.
I think some people are getting confused and a little upset about the conclusion in this video. To clarify. The GBA hardware is different from the Super Nintendo hardware, of course. It's based on RISC architecture and has various other custom abilities. BUT, for a lot of the software brought over from the SNES, it's essentially emulating the Super Nintendo routines to achieve the same effects on the handheld, either as direct code conversions or just indirectly and achieving the same aesthetic. Obviously it's not just a SNES emulator, that would be ridiculous.
Old 3DS isn't really fast enough for a highly compatible SNES emulator. Homebrew O3DS SNES emulators are either hacky and unreliable or more compatible and very slow.
The main reason Nintendo has the handheld market locked down is that the software selection was superior and you'd be kidding yourself if you dont think Nintendo has the best exclusive properties in gaming by a mile
And Id be remiss not to mention when it comes to comes to Nintendo handhelds in particular that Pokemon by itself seems to push portable systems by the millions
It was the combination of unbeatable exclusive titles and the affordability of the units themselves that helped Nintendo dominate the handheld market for so long. True, their handhelds may have been inferior to others on the market at the same time, but Nintendo's machines were half the price of those other machines, plus you couldn't play games like Pokemon or Mario on anything other than a Nintendo handheld, so if you wanted to play with your friends and they all had a Nintendo machine, you pretty much had to get one of your own too.
And lets also not forget battery life. The original Gameboy held its dominants for so long over its technologically superior competitors because you could play it and play it and play it for hours on end. They have never forgotten this, and Nintendo's handheld market continues to emphasize play time and enjoyment of what you are playing over being visually impressive (comparatively)
Nostalgia Nerd that's because it's a sprite based game... and they really don't look that similar, snes had quirks like the zooming and scaling and things like the multi backgrounds (seen in castlevania 4 and 5 a hell of a lot), really can't recall GBA ever using that. Closet part is the general graphics, but again, it's a sprite based game on a low res display, they all look very similar. No more similar than the genesis is to the gba, or hell, even games like castle crashers on a low res display. and then the gba's 3d capability was worlds apart, it was actually capable of real 3D outside of mode 7 style graphics as seen in things like Air Race Blue Roses (tech demo of Wipeout for GBA, music is absolutely abysmal but throw on some exceeder and you're all set). It's between the Super FX 2 and N64 in 3d power when used fully. Also of note is another prototype game / tech demo, GP Advance, again completely unreleased. Banjo Pilot (Voxel Engine Prototype) was in full 3D as well without using the mode 7 style, but it was scrapped for the final game.
+OK the GBA could definitely do scaling and rotation. The Super Nintendo could only scale and rotate a single background layer. The GBA on the other hand could do it to multiple sprites and backgrounds. Check out Gunstar super heroes as one example of that. As for the tech inside the GBA and SNES are totally different. Different processors, sound capabilities. Really there's no correlation between them. The only area the SNES excels over the GBA is the sample based sound hardware, the GBA was all cup driven so sounded worse unless you dedicated a lot of CPUs resources to the system.
I loved my gba and its snes ports. I was born in 1990, my parents didn't want to buy me a snes (n64 was my first console). Replaying all those gems on gba was pure bliss for me
The description of a RISC CPU at 3:05 made me want to punch someone. RISC CPU's aren't "cut down" processors that rely on you to do a lot of things off CPU, RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing, meaning, a CPU with a minimal set of small instructions that can be decoded and executed quickly, compared to a CISC architecture like x86 where you have larger instructions that do more, but take longer to run. The RISC design won, by the way, every modern x86 CPU you buy is actually a RISC CPU with an instruction decoder that translates the x86 instructions to smaller uops (micro-operations) that are then executed on the CPU core. The RISC design of ARM in particular is due to power consumption, larger, more complex instructions take more time and energy to decode and execute, by requiring the user of smaller, less complicated functions you can reduce power consumption dramatically and since the instruction decode process was much cheaper a misprediction from the branch prediction logic was cheaper to roll back from (and mispredicts back in 2001 where much more common, not to an extreme but branch prediction logic has gotten notable better since then).
You know, what you just mentioned here about prediction logic is approaching into what we today call a flaw that that has be redesigned away from because of the weaknesses that we a year ago found out about being harmful which is pretty sad.
@@TheRealFobican That was a flaw with the pre-fetch for the branch predictor, branch prediction is here to stay, modern CPUs would absolutely crawl without it.
Perhaps it wasn't intentional, but the title of the video asking if the GBA was "just" a portable SNES is condescending and seems to ignore the fact that people really, _really_ wanted SNES-like experiences on the go. Even though they were almost always inferior downports due to the oversaturation to compensate for the lack of a backlight, inferior sound quality due to the sound hardware difference, lack of buttons, reduced screensize and for whatevr reason, Nintendo's insistence to add the most annoying voice samples known to mankind in their ports. As much as I love Super Mario Bros. 2, I cannot play Mario Advance because of the voice samples. Even though there are plenty of original games made for the GBA, lots of people were asking throughout the entire life of the GBA when Chono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 would be ported. FF6 made it right at the tail end of the system's life, but sadly Chono Trigger was nowhere to be found. A real shame.
I always thought it was amazing that great gaming consoles of the past are able to be enhanced and crammed into a handheld. Like, the 3DS is definitely comparable to the GameCube as is the DS to N64
It's a big simplification but yeah. GBC was like a handheld NES, GBA was SNES, NDS was somewhere between N64 and NGC (Super Mario 64 DS is an N64 port but Metroid Prime Hunters is based on the same engine as Metroid Prime), 3DS was full NGC and Switch is a portable Wii plus entirely new home console.
There is something very important left out. The GBA has a really bad sound hardware. Just a DAC with a DMA. The CPU had to resample and process the music itself. The SNES on the other hand had hardware for that. The graphics on the other hand are quite good. Mode 7 is in fact supported by the GBAs video hardware! There is even a Mode 7 for sprites. So i believe this is stated a little bit wrong here.
You wanna know why the GBA is my favourite game system of all time? (Yes, I said "Game System" not "Handheld") I'll give you 3 reasons: 1 - It's like a Super Nintendo on-steroids that you can play anywhere 2 - It's a very solid handheld arcade, no other handheld that I can think of can give you an arcade-quality experience quite like the GBA, not even its successors (although the 3DS has taken steps in the right direction) 3 - It was retro before being retro was cool! It has the power of a 32bit CPU, but still has the charm of 16 bit graphics, and its mix of lower quality sampled music with chiptunes from the original GB soundchip that it carried over for backwards compatibility makes one of my favourite-sounding game systems ever, and it might just be the very last game system to have its own "Audio Identity" (I mean, if you listen to a GBA song, you KNOW it's on GBA) -~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-{ Extended Thoughts on GBA sound }-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~- One thing that needs to be said about the GBA audio that isn't said often: The GBA was technically capable of producing much higher quality audio than the Super Nintendo, however it didn't have a dedicated sampler soundchip like the SNES, it was the CPU that needed to process all of the audio, this meant that you had only 3 options to produce audio: 1 - Cram entire songs into a single huge sample to be streamed from the cartridge to either one or both the Direct-Audio channels. This is undesirable because a GBA cartridge can only hold up to 256 MEGA POWER (32MB) of data, so using this method leads to lots of compression, which leads to a very low-quality sound... 2 - Develop your own Software-based Sampler Audio Engine. This method basically mimics what the Super Nintendo did with its soundchip, the two most famous examples of this being done are Nintendo's own "Sappy Engine" and Shin'en's "GAX engine"... However, using this method the more samples you play at once the lower the quality will be, so devs often mixed samples with GB chiptunes to compose their music, and the results are, to me at least, absolutely beautiful! 3 - Use the Direct audio channels as regular 8 bit PCM channels. This method treats the GBA's sound system as an "NES/GB-on-steroids", composers who used this method basically used the GB's soundchip as the main sound generator on the system, the 2 direct audio channels were used to play uncompressed samples, each would only play 1 sample at a time, this allowed the system to play higher quality sampled audio than either of the aforementioned methods, however you were limited to only playing 2 at a time... Any games on the system that sounded "8 bit-ish" (like Doom, G&W Gallery 4 and Swordcraft Story 1) used this method, Doom 1 for example played drum samples on one Direct Audio channel, the rest of the music on the GB soundchip and sound effects played on both Direct Audio Channels, so whenever 2 sfx played at once they'd cut out the drums in order to play them both... In my opinion, the best method is undoubtedly the 2nd... If the GBA cartridge could hold, say, 600MB, then the first method could be used to play almost CD quality audio, but it can't, and the 3rd method is rather lazy and doesn't take full advantage of what the GBA could really do sound-wise... If you want to know how good the GBA can sound, look for the Iridion 2 soundtrack, by Shin'en, it uses the GAX engine that they developed and it sound like an 80s game! There's also Densetsu no Stafy 1, Gyakuten Saiban 3 and Mother 3, all Japan-only games for the system, but all of them have really good soundtracks, the first two show beautiful mixes of chiptunes with sampled audio, and the last one is probably the highest-quality audio on the system and it far surpasses what the SNES could produce... The soundtracks are easily findable here on RU-vid... Sorry for rambling, but I often get carried away when talking about the GBA >w>';
Only thing the GBA is lacking is space and limitation in hardware and format, the small cartridge prevents graphics chip to be install so games like Donkey Kong Country look wash out on GBA compare to SNES. Also because GBA only had four buttons compare to the SNES six buttons, games like Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 3 had to be tweak to work with the GBA's awkward four button layout whereas on SNES you could just assign any attack to any of the six button without tweaking anything with the config thus ruining what would had being a good arcade experience had Nintendo just added two extra action buttons to the GBA.
*** VOAN *** Actually what made the graphics in DKC to look washed out on the GBA was the unlit screen, not the graphics hardware, the GBA had far superior graphics hardware than the SNES, I won't get into specs but trust me, it would take 2 SNESes to achieve what you can do on GBA... But because the screen on the original GBA model was unlit, they had no choice but to deliberately make the graphics washed out so that they would be easier to see on that particular screen, in fact that was the biggest problem with the GBA (Not like it bothered me because I had an SP ;3) And well, I'll agree that the lack of buttons kinda held Street Fighter back on the GBA, but that didn't really hold back other arcade-like games because not that many games actually used 6 buttons you know, like King of Fighters EX2 and Metal Slug Advance, those are arcade-like games that worked beautifully on GBA! And it's not like you couldn't just adapt to playing SF with 4 or even 2 buttons on the GBA, when playing Street Fighter 2 I mapped the weak punch and kick to L and R, the medium punch and kick to tapping A and B and the strong punch and kick to holding A and B, and that worked just fine, and with the GBA SP's D-pad, which is really good btw, I could always consistently execute my special moves!
Ruko Michiharu The SNK games work wonderful (I just don't get why SNK doesn't make more of them) on the GBA as was Tekken Advance and the Guilty Gear X game but Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games always tend to have problem on GBA especially the 2D ones, because of that performing combos and juggle in those games just doesn't work quite as accurate. I do love how they are close to the arcade experience though. My other gripe was that most developers are lazy with ports that were coming for GBA, games like Mortal Kombat Advance, Contra 3, Tales of Phantasia, and Sonic Genesis which were either buggy, had sound problems, is broken or unplayable. The many good ports I love though are Final Fight One, Comix Zone, the Sega Smash Pack game especially Golden Axe, the Sega Arcade Gallery collection (After Burner and Outrun are still my favorites on those), Mega Man and Bass, Breath of Fire I & II, Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragons, the Final Fantasy Advance remakes, Rayman Advance, Super Ghouls N Ghost, Aladdin, and the Earthworm Jim games.
*** VOAN *** Notice how you've mentioned so many more good ports than bad? Well, yeah... Some ports were lazily done and are quite bad, but that's not the GBA's fault, there are bad ports in almost every system, it's all up to the devs to decide how much effort they're gonna put into them...
"Actually what made the graphics in DKC to look washed out on the GBA was the unlit screen, not the graphics hardware," Play it on a emulator, on a lit PC screen, then compare it with the SNES version. the GBA version looks much worse, sorry
I always thought that as a kid back in the early 2000s, cuz when I was lil my bro had a snes and I wasn't old enough to play let alone remember and much of the games were re releases such as final fight one ,shining force which is a sega game , super mario world etc
The whole RISC vs CISC comparison is not quite right. While RISC has a reduced instruction set, it's primary advantage is that almost every instruction can be completed in a single clock cycle. RISC chips usually have lower clock speeds than CISC chips because each instruction's pipeline is nearly identical. For RISC, higher CPU clock speeds directly mean a faster cpu, but with CISC chips that take multiple clock cycles per instruction the higher clock speed doesn't have the same linear performance advantage. The reasons the GBA is clocked higher is simply because the chip is much newer. If you look back to the mid 90's almost every RISC chip (SGI MIPS, Sun SPARC, IBM/Apple Power) were wiping the floor with intel's CISC chips at much less clock speeds. Intel realized this, and starting with the Core series, the implemented a RISC design with a CISC layer above it that broke down the CISC instructions into internal RISC instructions. The main reason the GBA is comparable to the SNES is that it's still a 2d device. The ARM chip was likely the easiest / cheapest chip to get ahold of at the time (Nintendo picked the z80 for the same reason). The extra power of the ARM chip also helps do things like full 32K color availability in bitmap mode. RISC vs CISC doesn't really matter much today as everyone is building a RISC design with the x86 vendors supporting the older CISC subsets via a compatibility layer.
RISC Processors have reduced instruction sets. This makes them faster and more efficient, and is generally of benefit. The video implied it resulted in more having to be done in software as a result, and that's likely to be inaccurate.
The reduced instruction set makes it neccesary that some stuff has to be coded differently, sometimes "longer". On the other hand RISC chips can be usually clocked higher. Quite similar to the difference between code in Assembler and in C. Assember code is faster than code in higher languages, but generally takes more lines for the same work. One is not directly faster or slower than the other.
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