Why did the GBA sound so fucking terrible?

Wanted to give other BNs some love too. I mean, 4 was ass, but I do think the boss theme is one of the best in the series.

Sonic Advance and Battle worked really well with GBA's gritty sound.

It's because the GBA had a shitty small speaker that they didn't make sound quality a priority when it came to designing the hardware since youw ere never going to hear good quality sound out of it anyways.

dunno theres some good ones here and there
youtube.com/watch?v=MKp5lwZBfxM
youtube.com/watch?v=w7YN5O1KzzQ

The difference is no Nintendo fan denies that GBA had terrible sound. Genesis fans still insist that Doom doesn't sound like shit on 32x and they'll post some shit that fans made, which wasn't present at the time and doesn't really count.

The GBA didn't have good sound hardware.
You had the old GB/C channels, which were outdated chirpy crap.
You also had PCM hardware, which is pretty dumb (i.e. it doesn't do much by itself) and is largely driven by the CPU.
Since the CPU has to mix and modulate a bunch of PCM samples it can often take a hit out of time for gameplay processing.
It depends on how good your programming is and how much overhead you can afford on you CPU. Thankfully the GBA CPU was pretty damn fast, it blows both the SNES and Genesis out of the water for sure.

youtube.com/watch?v=AZHRfsuHBu4
youtube.com/watch?v=7Rz1yOVNupE
youtube.com/watch?v=27nr40mewG0

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The Castlevania games sound pretty good, especially Circle of the Moon(which had pretty decent sampled instruments) and Harmony of Dissonance(which mostly uses sounds from the PSG1 module used in the japanese version of CVIII)

Fun trick with the sound that you can do with original GBAs, I don't know if many people even knew about this, if you insert headphone jack partially it plays only some of the sound channels. Makes some interesting tunes, depending on how its composed.

Anyway have these.
youtube.com/watch?v=zaBmqUmfSeY
youtube.com/watch?v=i0EDQvOrdLQ
youtube.com/watch?v=VYlEd5JwKmQ
youtube.com/watch?v=kYG9myVUD_M

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youtube.com/watch?v=vVdEPPtdLKY&

Man, I miss Advance Wars.

Trying to play Final Fantasy ports on GBA makes me want to tear my ears off, but some of the music made specifically for the GBA sounds pretty good. It was all up to how much they were able/willing to sacrifice for the sake of sound quality like somebody said earlier.

Use the restoration patches, most of them are pretty good.

Me too user me too. I'm surprised they didn't make a mobile game yet

I'd rather leave AW respectfully in its grave rather than dig up the corpse and parade it around as a mobage.

I tried one and it had an underlying hissing sound that most people were apparently too deaf to hear but I know was innate with the patch. I've heard there are better ones but haven't tried looking for them since then.

>implying
youtube.com/watch?v=BuLPc__NBxM

The unironic greatest video game soundtrack of all time is on the gameboy though.

youtube.com/watch?v=FnEg4M_WSJU

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>playing Superstar Saga
>getting to the wood part
>the music is just an 8 second loop
>drop the game because after a while I just can't bear it anymore

youtube.com/watch?v=fcS2fFi6PnY

The fact that Mother 3's OST is over 6 hours long and sounds as good as it does while being on the fucking gameboy is wizardry
youtube.com/watch?v=VZN02zPNirY
youtube.com/watch?v=mY9dTDKPpPk

Because you're cherry picking
youtu.be/9KdWTzJAT2k
youtu.be/-hsQDpCqxIg
youtu.be/5zmBYZOCl_8

the best

youtube.com/watch?v=NQEf2Cy_TlA

youtube.com/watch?v=XPY8JWoFqfc

Because it's developed by nintendo

youtube.com/watch?v=e8_i_uRIf8g&t=30s

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The fact that Snes samples are encoded at 5-bit and processed by a sound chip from 1990 and still sound beter is a testament to the GBA's shitty audio.

The fuck happened?
youtube.com/watch?v=ICHz0wnPqPg&t=17s

youtube.com/watch?v=NrvRU-7tTg0

shitty port plus Sega lost the fucking source code to Sonic 1

To add to my post, Stealth (one of the devs on Mania) made a competent GBA port of Sonic 1
stealth.hapisan.com/portfolio/S1DS.html

This game's music was so based.
youtube.com/watch?v=pf26E1YenV8
youtube.com/watch?v=dy6IZ1z7g04
youtube.com/watch?v=MiisjA3UlaY
youtube.com/watch?v=ffDjdnYI2UQ
youtube.com/watch?v=Wfm2kxTFa1U
youtube.com/watch?v=lUF-CWNJkys
youtube.com/watch?v=MC2qWB3Ac_c
youtube.com/watch?v=fbm7PN4Nc90

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restoration patches dont restore the sound effects though

The GBA was in an awkward place where it could potentially sound good but in practice often didn't. A solution would have been making the games sound intentionally video game-y but of course not all people like their games to be full of retro-sounding beeps and boops.

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You didn't make it

The GBA itself was fine soundwise, it was the ports that were absolutely atrocious.
youtube.com/watch?v=q5d1rrbNo3o

youtube.com/watch?v=QQRqnV0a_tI
youtube.com/watch?v=DRmTzNu_tps
youtube.com/watch?v=ZsEq3rkuRfk
youtube.com/watch?v=8YP4RrYJ95M
youtube.com/watch?v=2Jzr_UKGbTE

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With emulation can them remastered songs be added into golden sun?