GBA isn't really suffering from a bad sound chip like the Genesis did (where western devs made earrape a lot and the system's sound required a lot of work to make anything that sounded remotely decent, with Castlevania Bloodlines probably being the best sounding game on the system IMO), but it was hard to fit high quality music and a game on the same cart at times which led to cases like SF2 Turbo Revival having SNES quality sprites and voices but worse than NES era music. Golden Sun has godlike songs too, like Venus Lighthouse. I'd argue that RRT has a better soundtrack than any of the GBA FF ports or really most RPGs on the GBA. The ports of ALTTP and the SMA games sound excellent (though the voices in SMA1 can be a bit irritating), and Pokemon Red Rescue Team sounds infinitely better on the GBA than BRT on the DS due to being made to benefit from the GBA's soundchip in mind. Still a good game though.Ī lot of GBA games have great songs, IMO. The ending credits is SUPER high quality audio too, which is such a whiplash when you hear it that it's crazy. Oh yep, this game was infamous for low quality audio since they made a lot more tracks and made the songs more NES-y to compensate. This in turn led to the music not sounding as good as it could have.īut there's plenty of great GBA music made that was more mindful of the limitations of the platform. Many GBA developers decided to use low quality sound mixing in order to preserve CPU power for gameplay. The GBA only has two Direct wave sound channels, so that meant making high quality MIDI music on the GBA required using lots of precious CPU time. If you have too few sound channels, then you will need to use the CPU to perform high quality sound mixing to mix several sounds down to one channel. What might be the biggest point of failure, however, is this: If you want to have high quality MIDI music, which will most likely have many instruments playing on top of one another, you will ideally want many sound channels - one channel for each sound playing. Cartridge space was limited, so many GBA developers decided to compress their sounds into something granier and lower quality, and you have a recipe for low quality music.The Direct sound channels only have 8 bits of resolution, which sounds noticeably worse compared to the 16 bit resolution of CD music.Compare this recording with this recording. Some emulators don't get the volume of the Game Boy sound channels mixed correctly with the Direct sound channels, so yes, emulators may make the GBA sound worse because half the music may be drowned out.Here are a few potential points of failure for GBA music:
It has two Direct sound channels where you can play any sounds you want.This is why a lot of GBA music might have sounds and/or music we associate with the 8-bit era. It includes the original Game Boy's sound hardware.
Here's a quick run-down of the GBA's sound capabilities:
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