Was the Gameboy Advance Just a Super Nintendo? [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd

Gameboy Advance vs. Super Nintendo... is the GBA just a Super Nintendo in smaller form? Did Nintendo simply repackage their 11 year old hardware into their latest handheld in order to get a cheap, quick and easy to develop portable gaming device out to the masses, or is there something different going on under the plastic GBA casing? Is the hardware much more than we originally realised? Is it capable of things we can now only dream of?... Well, I won't be answering all of these specific questions, but I will answer the question on whether the Gameboy Advance is just a SNES in different clothing, and the reasons behind whatever the outcome of that question are. Join me for another epsiode of Byte Size.
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Some images courtesy of Wikipedia/Wikimedia.
GBA video footage from Alberto Gil Tesa @ • Game Boy Advance - 200...
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Under CC licencing.

[@barryinglaterra]

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.

[@Fractal_blip]

Thats crazy

[@spider-ham7140]

Cool

[@vanhalenbr]

I am really amazed of what the SNES could do with limited specs, I really have an admiration for old time programmers.

[@tony_47]

I think it’s very neat

[@Gotmilk0112]

Yep, I had the same thoughts as a kid when I got my GBA. "man this thing is like a portable SNES!"

[@NiGHTSnoob]

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.

[@jackson5116]

*cough* Sony sound chips baby! Sony knows sound!

[@codymcgrew4015]

Nary lol never heard that prior to today

[@deathtrooper2048]

The original Fzero seems to be much faster than the GBA ones

[@NiGHTSnoob]

@@deathtrooper2048 Maybe the earlier ones, but not Climax. It also has more simultaneous AI racers and a lot more frames of animation per vehicle.

[@PKSuperStar256]

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.

[@SteveBenway]

GBA SP is still one of my fave handhelds :D

[@NicB-Creations]

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.

[@CDNSpartan]

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

[@SumDumGai5]

Nic B I agree. GBA original felt like I was holding a controller. It felt great. I'm the one who stole your GBA, just to let you know.

[@bangerbangerbro]

Matthew Walsh I bought a DS for £16 including postage off of eBay in 2013.

[@Abbnfitchguy]

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.

[@Ghennesph]

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*.

[@Nostalgianerd]

I like the bit where you repeated what I said in the video, just using different words.

[@Ghennesph]

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

[@BADC0FFEE]

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

[@ThatLinuxGamer]

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.

[@niahoad]

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

[@tetsujin_144]

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.

[@RetrOrigin]

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.

[@MrJ0mmy]

yeah use high rez on everything and you won't be able to fit the game on the cart

[@otherhalf228]

I...gotta say...I agree. snes did not have the res some people claim. I wish it did...but it just didn't

[@bkid8626]

He didn't say that was the SNES's resolution used all the time, he specifically said "maximum", which is correct.

[@otherhalf228]

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

[@RetrOrigin]

To Z Super Eagle multi samples the image x2, so that's definitely not a proper way to measure resolution.

[@mcphantom99]

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

[@mcphantom99]

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

[@Dargonhuman]

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.

[@pika62221]

or that they've been doing it for 36 years now.

[@k1productions87]

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)

[@0xD1CE]

The original gameboy had a long battery life because it didn't include a backlit screen.

[@dykodesigns]

The snes did have better sound hardware, the gba draws on the gb sound together with a crude lower spec dac.

[@MidnightMechanic]

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.

[@ElysaraCh]

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.

[@dan_loup]

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).

[@dykodesigns]

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.

[@ElysaraCh]

+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.

[@FuZhixiang]

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.

[@TheFlyingJester]

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.

[@1990chrism]

Also RISC works on the principle that the missing instructions tend to be the ones required less frequently.

[@idontusenumbers]

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.

[@blackhatfreak]

I remember getting my GBA holiday 2001, loved it.

[@john__]

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.

[@juststatedtheobvious9633]

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.

[@slowburntm3584]

I love the duration of your intro splash animation, it is perfect, IMO. Though, it does make me happy when you cut into it a bit by starting your narration a few milliseconds early. :P

[@SureyD]

The like/dislike ratio is not how I'd set it, and the top comments don't really show any kind of constructive, or at least polite criticism. You -Nostalgia Nerd- have done a good job on this video, and I'm subscribing. You bet I'm looking forward to more in the future.

[@Nostalgianerd]

Much appreciated my friend, I hope you enjoy future videos :)

[@Zacharoni_DX]

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

[@tudobem12]

I subscribed just because u put subtitles in your videos, thank you so much!

[@KannX]

Interesting video!! Never thought that GBA's processor was so powerful!

[@EarnestWilliamsGeofferic]

Short answer: No. Long answer: Nope. GBA was entirely different architecture and more powerful.

[@Arismory]

But still weaker than a n64

[@Lucas_van_Hout]

Timestandingtime somewhere on between.

[@oppium7588]

@@Arismory No shit Sherlock

[@Mud9]

Crazy how much more powerful but such bad resolution.

[@dihydrogenoxide5109]

@@Mud9 what? You think you're gonna play it on a fucking television? Fucking refrigerator.

[@slopesgameroom]

quality video mate :) really enjoyed my GBA

[@hola-gy8te]

What heppened to it? You said "enjoyed"

[@KidPrarchord95]

@@hola-gy8te You spelled "happened" wrong.

[@hola-gy8te]

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.

[@AnonymousFrogNG]

But hello you.

[@firestriker3580]

Your videos are complete shit Daniel Ibbertson

[@marvelfanno1]

Very informative great video. I subbed

[@shmupshmuppewpew5260]

Excellent video! I love both systems, but didn't get the GBA until I was an adult.

[@StefanNuxoll]

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).

[@TheRealFobican]

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.

[@SerBallister]

@@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.

[@EvenTheDogAgrees]

That, and a RISC architecture is a lot more conductive to pipelining.

[@Michirin9801]

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 KZbin... Sorry for rambling, but I often get carried away when talking about the GBA >w>';

[@VOAN]

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.

[@Michirin9801]

*** 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!

[@VOAN]

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.

[@Michirin9801]

*** 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...

[@DrJones20]

"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

[@paulrahme]

Enjoyable video but wish there were more details about the tiled background layers + sprites, and how they compared in the 2 systems!

[@GameFanaticsNL]

I really love the review, Because I always asked myself if the GBA and Snes can be compared :D Thanks for the video.

[@12me91]

In terms of how the games looked on the surface, yes, but the hardware was so much different which was kinda neat.

[@MorimotoYTP]

GB > Color TV Game 6 GBC < NES GBA > SNES DS = N64 3DS < GC

[@greenaum]

< 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.

[@bangerbangerbro]

MorimotoYTP You mean DS

[@mparagames]

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

[@bangerbangerbro]

BFDIFan447 lol 3DS = Wii U?

[@cyclops8238]

BFDIFan447 more like wii

[@Nostalgianerd]

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.

[@PhilieBlunt666]

Nostalgia Nerd that would actually be kinda awesome... but mebbe thats just me heh

[@unusuariomas9945]

So... Old 3DS can run Snes VC games? why only new 3DS can run it?

[@nrrork]

To sell more New 3DSes

[@jc_dogen]

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.

[@justanotheryoutubechannel]

Nostalgia Nerd It's not just a SNES, it's a portable SNES with more games!

[@nomemio6038]

Really really interesting, i was posing to me the same question... Thanks !

[@Slamy4096]

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.

[@MikeKasprzak]

Ouch. That's not what RISC does. RISC just means every instruction has a fixed width, 2 or 4 bytes each (depending on the CPU mode). CISC (the other way) means some instructions are short (1 byte) and others are longer (2, 3, 4, 6, 8, there are no rules). You're thinking DSP's, and both the SNES and GBA had them. The DSPs here were addon hardware that does a single thing repeatedly, like copy. Tell the DSP what to do, and wait. Regrettably the DSP hogged the bus, but it was still faster to "DSP" a larger chunk of data from cart to VRAM then it was to do a copy with the CPU (but in the GBA's case, 32bit wide writes combined with unrolled loops held their own vs the DSP). So it was just a light balance of deciding what actions you should DSP, and which ones had to be handled by the CPU. If desired, you could have done everything with the CPU. That's what we had to do on GameBoy, and even that was a dream compared to the systems running 6502 family CPUs. The GBA let us be lazy, and get away with it. Comparing the raw MHz doesn't tell the whole story, since the ARM chip could process 4x the data in a single cycle (32bit vs 8bit). Plus you had so many more very wide CPU registers on ARM. You could do some extremely complex math entirely in the CPU, where the SNES would have to juggle values in/out of RAM. If the SNES ever looked better, and yes I mean ever, it's because we were lazy on the GBA. Compared to every 8 and 16 bit Nintendo console that came before it, the GBA was quite literally Christmas. The GBA was what we wish we had.

[@Gamelengnds]

I couldn't help but wonder how someone through the 6502 with *three* user registers and a slow memory bus could be faster than an ARM7.

[@CMSonYT]

it is so strange he got this wrong. makes me question his other videos.

[@makerarchive6502]

TLDR version: the GBA processor took more pre maintenance to get better performance than the snes but it was more powerful if you had the time. honesty who gives a shit if its not the snes, the 8 bit sound was horrible though

[@asmallbabby4205]

Not DSP. You're thinking of DMA.

[@ebangham]

You're leaving out the fact that being a RISC instruction set generally implies that instructions should not depend on any hard to predict register state (load and store). This is to avoid inhibiting branch prediction and other pipelining processes that allow for on chip parallelism. This video is even more invalid due to the fact that modern chip designs with complex instructions are typically are RISC under the hood. A second layer containing the state for complex instructions is present in order to implement the microcode required for the complex instructions.

[@B33FY2011]

It's something I have always thought about the GBA it had a lot of past SNES games on with just new features so I obviously assumed that it was just the SNES crammed into a handheld.

[@kahncrane]

Great Video, Thank You.

[@Soulintent95]

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.

[@Lupo32]

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

[@Bortniky]

This question has plagued me for half of my life. Awesome video.

[@98raoul]

This is so interesting, you could make a very cool series about it, like comparison between GB/GBC and NES, NDS and N64, PSP and PS2, Vita and PS3, 3DS and Gamecube, even the Switch and the WiiU would work!

[@storerestore]

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.

[@TAVIII]

no? it's nowhere near a super nintendo... far better at 3D than the snes, 32bit... everything different

[@Nostalgianerd]

It is better. That's because the CPU was more powerful. But the point is, most of the games looked like direct SNES ports, hence the question.

[@TAVIII]

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.

[@ourlad1337]

+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.

[@SethVermin]

If you watched the video you'd find he agrees with you.

[@steamedauroraborealis8208]

And guess what? He also said it wasn't.

[@mini-_]

No, because the GBA was 32-bit (it says so on the box, so it must be true) and the SNES was 16-bit.

[@colonelkomarov622]

and wii is a 256 bits? wii U a 512 bits ? :p

[@valletas]

Bits dont really matter look at tge ps4 bits you expect them to be 300 or 500 but if i am not mistaken they are 64 or 32 bits

[@deletedaccount3187]

the gba could play snes music just fine, but the gba makes it more muffled as i hear it

[@Lightblue2222]

@@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.

[@ethanpixelate]

@@colonelkomarov622 no, even the most state of the art gaming hardware (be it a switch, playstation 4, pc), are 64-bit

[@ajmetz82]

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.

[@ebangham]

It's not "likely to be inaccurate", it is definitively inaccurate, not to mention misleading.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

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.

[@Flip86x]

The GBA sucked. The lack of a backlight was a horrible idea. Why have full color if you couldn't see it? You had to have the perfect setting and viewing angle to play games. The GBA SP was far superior.

[@okioki1131]

and better than that even is the SP 101 to the SP 001, the 101 had a much nicer screen

[@Monody512]

I agree that the SP had a much better screen… but it was horrible on the ergonomics.

[@DrJones20]

What I didn't like about the SP was the blue tint the backlight added to the games. It wasn't before Nintendo DS that you could see the GBA games in all their glory

[@Flip86x]

Maybe, but compared to the original GBA, it was a gigantic improvement.

[@DrJones20]

Flip86 Minus the design, I guess so

[@TheAbsol7448]

It may have lower sound quality, but some GBA games sounded absolutely amazing. Take Amazing Mirror and the Pokemon games, for instance.

[@kurtownsj00]

My first 2 years of HS I had a 2 hour bus ride that started at 5:30AM. My buddy and I (when not sleeping) used to play hours upon hours of Mario Kart Super Circuit on the Advance...being able to link up and play 4 tracks even if only one person had it was sick. Made for 3 and 4 player possibilities when normally would have just been 2! The original GBA was the first handheld I modded, installing aftermarket lighting kit and painting the clear purple case several different colors over its lifetime, leading me to figure out which paints were the toughest against wearing down.

[@OxKing]

I bought the GBA right when it came available in Germany, along with Tony Hawk Pro Skater for it. I never thought this game would be possible on a SNES although it just was isometric and not real 3D it looked amazing to me for the time. Especially on a Gameboy.

[@kannabi]

Nintendo Handhelds usually roughly match the power of the previous generation console if you think about it: gb/gbc = NES gba = SNES DS = N64 3DS = Gamecube New 3DS = Wii

[@ilmevavi1112]

not really. wii was 2x the power of gc but the new 3ds is not that much better than the normal one

[@kannabi]

Well, I'm matching the power based on the games they have, the new 3ds only has one, which is a Wii game (Xenoblade Chronicles). High end 3ds games generally match the level of a gamecube. It is hard to say with the new 3ds though, since it doesn't really have any games.

[@shagstars]

You gove one thing wrong, wii was slower than the gamecube (in specs).

[@ilmevavi1112]

ShagStars Productions wii was 2x as powerful than gamecube

[@retrosoul8770]

Pretty interesting how it comes close to being perfectly in sync but not quite, almost there. NES>GB GBC>NES GBA>SNES N64>DS GC>3DS Correct me if im wrong but I think this is how it goes especially regarding the GBA.

[@sin3r6y98]

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.

[@rars0n]

Intel started using RISC with the Pentium Pro, well before the Core series.

[@emiliohernandez7214]

Very informative Before I educated myself I always thought A Link to the Past was a GBA game originally (yes I know there's a port) because the graphics look similar

[@deusexaethera]

I generally hate "walled gardens", but I love Nintendo's walled garden. There's something comforting about videogame franchises that survive for decades in a world where software comes and goes in a year or two.

[@Crumpdiddy]

This was already covered in a e3 interview a long time ago. But Nintendo has stated that they always believed that its necessary to always make portable versions to their past beloved consoles to give new and old gamers a chance to relive the classics plus new exclusive games to grow the fan base. I believe it was 2003 e3 but not 100 percent sure on the year.

[@RetroGamerBB]

hey can you do a "isn't a ds just a super n64" video?

[@MattyStoked]

Really well made an interesting video, mate. Now answer the most important question, why there was no back light in the original GBA!

[@erika_fuzzbottom]

Battery life and price. Backlit screens were still too expensive at the time, even at that size, and they ate up battery life in a hurry. Nintendo wanted an affordable handheld device that didn't eat all your batteries.

[@JohnnyMatherson]

cost (at the time) + more AAs to power it.

[@GamesFromSpace]

Adding to the points about cost, front lit LCDs were just much more colorful than any comparably priced backlit LCD.

[@ronnierobinson9262]

Excellent video

[@s4ndwichMakeR]

That’s like asking “Was the PC just an N64?” after seeing a PC game that has been ported to the N64 fairly well.

[@e8root]

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

[@DaveGamesVT]

Interesting video.

[@ToastGhost26]

The sound comparison in 2:30 made me think. GBA sounds like being outside listening to rain, while the SNES reminded me of being in a warm home, where the sound is sort of blurred

[@SatoshiMatrix1]

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.

[@HipsterBlackMetalOfficial]

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.

[@TheZeroSbr]

They were made with the original, unlit screen in mind. They had to make them brighter.

[@HipsterBlackMetalOfficial]

TheZeroSbr doesn't excuse the stretched out and shitty sprites.

[@TheZeroSbr]

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.

[@SimonvCleef]

Most look good. The gba version being on a handheld are also more pick up and play. The gba is overall way better than the snes.

[@SimonvCleef]

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.

[@GameplayandTalk]

Very interesting. It makes me wonder what the average performance would be like on the GBA if it had the same resolution as the SNES.

[@klausb.7505]

I liked the Video, just for the question being asked.

[@ciprianmogosanu7169]

if you look at snes doom and gba doom and a lot of other 3d gba /advanced 2d games we can conclude that the gba was even more powerfull than not only the fx chip,but the fx 2 chip

[@Nostalgianerd]

Well, yes, the CPU is far more powerful in the GBA, allowing for more software trickery, and also has to output to a lower resolution. The reason for the question is that most games looked like direct SNES ports.

[@ciprianmogosanu7169]

Nostalgia Nerd you should have mentioned the main reason why they are not a lot more like 2d/3d ps1 games:memory limitations;not ram[i think they even had some times extra ram in the cart],but a cd can hold 700 mb and a gba cart has only 32-64mb,so a lot of compression must be done;some other things happen like less frames of animation,some of the cpu gose to sound proccessing because carts can not do mp3 files,lower resolution sprites and smaller game ares beacuse of compression

[@Wheeljack2k]

And yet for some reason the credits of Yoshi's Island (stork flying through the night) run considerably slower on the GBA than on the SNES. Wonder what happened there.

[@jacobjason9879]

this. probably because of the cart size.

[@dacution]

Check out Driver 3. The gba was capable of 3d graphics that rival early ps1 games.

[@andrefinger5124]

A direct port of a game looks similar on a different system? Oh noes!

[@woknmaki4885]

Your Videos depress me sometimes because it makes me realise how old I am physically, but my brain is like HOLY SHIT! A FOLDING GBA! Even Backlit... O_O. But all in all they are super informative and interesting. I just wish sometimes I could just go about 10 years back in time.

[@coolbrotherf127]

I really loved my GBA Advanced. I spent tons of time playing it while waiting for my sister to finish ballet practice and in the car on long trips.

[@isthisnickvalid]

Any developer here? Because I seem to remember that the GBA did have hardware mode 7 or whatever it is called. Its 2d "gpu" was quite powerful, many cellphones that came out much later and have a much faster ARM processor could not compete with its graphics. Only the n-gage.

[@Nostalgianerd]

It had the ability for 2 layers, known as mode 2 which could scale and rotate

[@WolfCoder]

I've written software for the GBA before and you can confirm by reading the "GBA Tonc" tutorials that the perspective mapping was never a built in thing on the SNES NOR the GBA. You had to use the rotation/scaling background mode (which both have in hardware) and HBlank effects to do perspective mapping.

[@Optimus6128]

That's true, something I didn't know initially. The SNES Mode 7 will take two vectors for the rotation/zooming but if the same vectors apply on the whole frame you have 2d rotation. But when they change rapidly per line these vectors you can get the floor mapping. It just happens because if a floor rotates in 3d around the Y axis (up) or X axis, the Z is the same in one scanline. Not the case for rotating around Z so that would be hard or impossible to do on SNES. So the same Z per one scanline would mean the same set of interpolation vectors per scanline, only changing every other scanline. It's the same for GBA I heard, they have the bitmap interpolation functionality, but then you have to compile with horizontal syncing to create floor mapping effects. But it's all in hardware and minimal CPU code spent.

[@leadbones]

It had sprite scaling and rotation, yes. It wasn't called Mode 7 because it wasn't a graphics mode on SNES hardware.

[@Jikyuu]

Ahh, good battery life. You listening iPhone?

[@Essu_]

So does my android. What's Apple's excuse?

[@04dram04]

personally my iphone battery has lasted longer, than any of my androids. Most notably its lifespan

[@cortster12]

Quantum mechanical effects, due to the extremely small gaps in our chips, are just going to reduce battery life more and more every year until we reach the absolute limit of Moore's law. In the meantime, we will need to either invent better batteries (by no means an easy task, given how much batteries have stayed the same), or figure out how to use electron tunneling to our advantage instead of trying to work around it. Oh, and if you don't know what electron tunneling is -- think of it like a short circuit bleeding electricity between wires and causing excess heat. Pretty much what it does, except in this case it's literally teleportation.

[@luijo633]

0:45 aaahh when the ads were dark, good times

[@enigmaxaero]

Loved Rick Shapiro in that Platinum commercial. 😆😆😆

[@ventuno1]

the age old question? I've literally never heard anyone propose that because t's obvious that they're entirely different machines

[@leomon32]

The sound wasn't really as good as the Snes really. Some games were plain terrible soundwise.

[@1990chrism]

That's what nintendo got for backstabbing Sony, Sony developed the SNES sound chip, with them out of the picture nintendo had to make do with what they could find elsewhere.

[@audrey9561]

Most gba games actually sounded really good with headphones but the speakers didn’t convey the sound well

[@KidPrarchord95]

@@audrey9561 Yeah, the speakers had a lower bitrate

[@chad_bro_chill]

Audrey, "really good," sure, but definitely not as good as the SNES original. Yoshi's Island's soundtrack is significantly flatter on GBA, and several sound effects are missing entirely (like the washing machine in the background of castle sections that separated the sewers/dungeons from the regular castle areas). (I don't know how representative Yoshi's Island is of the GBA library as a whole, however).

[@KidPrarchord95]

@@chad_bro_chill The reason most GBA music doesn't sound as good as you'd expect is because the sound runs directly on CPU cycles instead of having it's own dedicated processor like the SNES. More complex sound = more lag

[@InputArchive]

V Rally 3 and Asterix on GBA are still phenomenal graphical feats, I have no idea how they got those 3D graphics out of the system.

[@RJTheHero8]

I really like these comparison videos with Nintendo's Home Console vs. Handheld equivalents. Now if only there was a video comparing the 3DS with the Gamecube in terms of specs. I'd find a video like that pretty interesting. :)

[@DrJones20]

The Gamecube wins

[@IONATVS]

Original 3DS had specs better than N64 but worse than GCN, I'd say the New 3DS has specs that are similar to the GCN or even Wii (since the wii wasn't *that* much more powerful than the GCN, and most of what was added went to processing the motion controls). Note that the New 3DS has seen a major Wii RPG, Xenoblade Chronicles, ported to it (with significant graphical reduction, but otherwise wholly intact), and the 3DS ports of Smash4 and Hyrule Warriors, while sluggish on the original 3DS, run smoothly and stablely on New 3DS, despite being ports of current-gen games (again, with reduced graphics and a less reliable online for smash, but from a mechanical standpoint they are excellent ports)

[@vasileios6301]

3ds has very low res compared to Gamecube.

[@DrJones20]

IONATVS The New 3DS still fall short of Gamecube, which in turn is very close to the Wii. Look at at Wii vs New 3DS comparisons and you see how the the 3ds is getting crushed by the Wii

[@AlterMannCam]

"snez" "nez"

[@RobCrawford23]

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)

[@corsairegg]

Rob Crawford clearly you don’t know what you are talking about too. Which instructions take 50+ cycles on Intel and 1 or 2 on ARM ? No one.

[@mattn83]

Great channel...

[@RadicalRickEntertainment]

0:15 I used that music for my Nintendo Switch spoof video last year good choice lol.

[@Rexeljet]

Why are there so many people in the comments crying about the pronunciation of NES and SNES?

[@Nostalgianerd]

I can only presume that they enjoy complaining about petty matters, that they were bullied by someone who also pronounced it SNEEZZZZZZ or that they just like to make some noise to feel important. Or maybe they just hold their own pronunciation to such high regard that they cannot accept any variation of it into their lives what-so-ever, for risk of aneurysm. It's a mystery. What's certain, is that I give less than 2 shits :D

[@Zombiepull]

for me as a German it isnt even a Question. S-N-E-S sounds like a advancend Powermachine. Snes sounds like a wet fart... at least i Germany :) well, to be fair over here it is almost only called Super Nintendo

[@joeygreathouse3029]

Because it isn't spelled Snezz?

[@joeygreathouse3029]

Yeah, I've never heard it called "SNEZ" until this video. It's always been "Super Nintendo" "Super NES" or "S-N-E-S" 100% of the time.

[@J__C__]

Rexeljet because only dipshits say nez and snez. Just like the dipshits that call nitrous "noz" or "noss" and write it out as "NOS", which is actually a nitrous company called "Nitrous Oxide Systems" which is owned by Holley Performance Products. It's written N₂O and pronounced nitrous. Just like the NES is pronounced En-Ee-Es. Not nez.

[@LAG09]

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.

[@boptillyouflop]

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)

[@randykitchleburger2780]

I'm not a Nintendo fan but I can appreciate such old hardware that can drive nearly 480p display... Amazing for it's time.

[@jaymzx2587]

Yeah! I always wondered about this.

[@LotoTheHero]

This is obviously a no. Completely different hardware and super easy to look up on the internet.

[@Nostalgianerd]

Go and look it up on the internet then rather than wasting your precious time here.

[@LotoTheHero]

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.

[@ethanvalencia1500]

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 KZbin/internet content, not sure why there's any fuss about that.

[@orderofmagnitude-TPATP]

its the same as a 3d ds - is that just an n64 with a 3d display?

[@TheAbsol7448]

It was somewhere between N64 and GCN.

[@mynthon0]

And this has 4 thumbs up!?!? The "3D DS" is obviously much more powerful than N64, it's closer to GC. The original DS is quite comparable to N64, but the overall "look" is more similar to PS1 games.

[@KratosAurionPlays]

If you haven't already you should compare the DS to the N64 and the 3DS to the Gamecube and Wii.

[@TheRealFobican]

This brings me back to before 4k and all that top modern stuff even came.

[@Disthron]

It's not really that complicated, quantity and better designed games trump hardware specs. The Game Gear and the Lynx had better tech under the hood, but they were plagued with many practical issues. Like there huge size and low battery life. Sega and later Sony tried to leap frog over Nintendo but the tech ether wasn't small enough or cheap enough to make it practical. A similar thing happened in both console and PC markets back in the day. Many more people bought the C64 over the Amega, because it was cheaper and it had most of the games, same thing with IBM PC compatibles. Again, much inferior hardware to the Amega, but generally much cheaper so more people had them, so more games were made for them, so more people who were interested in playing games bought PCs. It creates a positive feedback loop. I thought some games did have extra chips on the cartridge. You can tell from the 3D games that the GBA is much more powerful than the SNES. Look at V-Rally 3, Wing Commander 4 ect for other good examples. Anyway ,good video.

[@KurtThom4s]

I don't miss coughing up six batteries into the gamegear... and the nomad was even worse. =X Much like the virtual boy, the battery pack would shift right out of place if you so much as leaned it back on a table for support (which you often wanted to do due to its weight)

[@Disthron]

Kurt Thomas Yea, apparently most of the battery drain comes from the fluorescent back-light! When I first started looking into getting my Game Gear fixed, I found out an LED mod was very popular to do. It took me a while to figure out that people weren't replacing the red power LED, they were replacing the fluorescent back-light with white LEDs and drastically increasing the battery life!

[@RetroArcadeGuy]

Games exclusives for the GBA are cool. Ports of games on GBA are shit.

[@WilliamMcCarthyIII]

but Super Mario Advanced 2

[@jacobbelyea7945]

Min Nohara's Channel Of Fun Nigga have you ever played the Spongebob Squarepants Movie game on Gba? That shit's great.

[@221b]

A key difference between the GBA and the SNES is that the GBA was capable of sprite scaling and rotation, while the SNES could only do that with backgrounds. This meant that, while the SNES's mode 7 could only be used for some superficial visual effects (barring the occasional racing game) the GBA could actually incorporate rotating objects into its gameplay. That's why the GBA was able to have a decent port of Space Harrier (in the Sega Arcade Gallery,) something none of the major home consoles of the 16-bit era were capable of without add-ons.

[@menelmacar3]

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.

[@theresamadden4476]

Game. Boy. Not Gameboy. GAME BOY!

[@broken1394]

Theresa Madden gameperson

[@yet_another_communist]

@@broken1394 PlayBoy... Oh,oops...

[@DNAsGhostzHouze]

It's ridiculous that Nintendo took 10 years longer than Sega to release a handheld with backlight and color...

[@ontariolacus]

That seems to be a deliberate decision to increase battery life and decrease price.

[@DNAsGhostzHouze]

ontariolacus I guess, but Nintendo had the same model out for over a decade, even the first two Pokemon games were formatted for it. Also Nintendo makes, lets call them quirky decisions all the time. The Wii didn't come with a traditional control, but I won't hold that against them for trying to innovate. However, the next console they put out, the Wii-U, is basically nothing but a controller. Exhibit B- The Virtual Boy.

[@pika62221]

Sega wasn't even the first! Atari had a backlit, color handheld, so did NEC, Neo Geo, Nokia. It was finally nearly 15 years after Game Boy that they released a backlit color system!

[@pika62221]

same model out for over a decade? Guess you never heard of Game Boy POCKET released in 1996, 7 years after Game Boy...

[@DNAsGhostzHouze]

Jude Law I'm sorry but I don't consider that a different console, just a more compact one. It's the same difference between the PS3 and the PS3 Slim. Also nothing in your original comment is relative to the original post. My point was that it took Nintendo 10+ years longer than Sega (They're biggest competitor at the time) to release a handheld with backlight and color, but thank you for your imput.

[@VenoStuff]

I have both SNES and GPA SP. Did not even thought that those could be almost the same :D

[@magnusjohansson295]

Just bought a GBA SP AGS 101. Gonna be fun...

[@VaughnJogVlog]

Get the feeling these nostalgia channels are slowing dying. There's only so much geek past to do videos over before everyone says the same thing, simply repeating information from a Wikipedia entry.

[@Rui-ej3yw]

Well, let's see. 218,252 subscribers vs 3,744 in your shitty "vlog". Lmao. No, they aren´t dying, you know why? Nostalgia never dies and there are tons of stuff to talk about. It's only in Nintendo videos that the butthurt is strong like in this one. Toxic cult full of idiots. Have a nice day and stay strong in your "vloging" lol. (vlogs, now those are a thing of the past and no nostalgia there).

[@davidmasci4335]

Title should read- Was the SNEZ just a Super Nintendo?

[@retrovideogamejunkie]

DAT rain sound in the SNES link to the past

[@animefreak6782]

i had both and actually i though it would be just my opinion that they are similar. That is actually great in my eyes because you could play SMW at your TV and later play it at school or somewhere else