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Former SNES and GBA hobbyist developer here. The different CPUs aside - Z80 in the GB, 6502 in the NES, 65816 in the SNES and ARM in the GBA - the GB, just like

Former SNES and GBA hobbyist developer here. The different CPUs aside - Z80 in the GB, 6502 in the NES, 65816 in the SNES and ARM in the GBA - the GB, just like the NES, shares very little with the SNES. The GBA is a different story: it is in so many ways like the SNES' sibling, but an improved sibling, most distinctly because of its open memory architecture allowing convenient and fast access to all of its custom hardware, whereas in the SNES the video and sound chip RAM is tucked away behind single-byte-sized memory channels you have to access by shoveling bytes manually (or by programmable DMA) back and forth between CPU-accessible RAM and video/sound chip RAM etc. This architectural choice was in my opinion the largest improvement the GBA brought, more so than moving away from the SNES' custom "sound computer" which was a bit of a hurdle.

pezezin 5y ago
Now that you mention the sound, I always had this question: was the GBA sound system any good? My understanding is that the GBA only has the original GB sound chip plus two PCM channels, without any dedicated hardware synthesis or mixing, so all sound effects need to run on software. Now the CPU was so much faster than the SNES or Megadrive, but was it fast enough to make up for it?
- djur 5y ago
  GBA games were generally regarded as having lower sound quality than SNES games, although this perception was somewhat exaggerated by the poor quality of some SNES->GBA ports. It took a lot more CPU to get good audio out of the GBA, and I'm sure developers were taking the GBA's tinny speaker into account when deciding how much effort to invest in polishing the soundtrack. Hell, the GBA SP needed an adapter to use headphones!
- daneel_w 5y ago
  It has the GB legacy sound and two 8-bit PCM channels (stereo wave output basically). It is definitely worse than the SNES - however, because of how fast the ARM is (relatively speaking) it has no problem doing software mixing to provide developers with effectively 4, 6 and even 8 channels of PCM audio for soundtracks and effects. Not as smooth sound, but totally sufficient.

pezezin 5y ago

Now that you mention the sound, I always had this question: was the GBA sound system any good? My understanding is that the GBA only has the original GB sound chip plus two PCM channels, without any dedicated hardware synthesis or mixing, so all sound effects need to run on software. Now the CPU was so much faster than the SNES or Megadrive, but was it fast enough to make up for it?

djur 5y ago
GBA games were generally regarded as having lower sound quality than SNES games, although this perception was somewhat exaggerated by the poor quality of some SNES->GBA ports. It took a lot more CPU to get good audio out of the GBA, and I'm sure developers were taking the GBA's tinny speaker into account when deciding how much effort to invest in polishing the soundtrack. Hell, the GBA SP needed an adapter to use headphones!
daneel_w 5y ago
It has the GB legacy sound and two 8-bit PCM channels (stereo wave output basically). It is definitely worse than the SNES - however, because of how fast the ARM is (relatively speaking) it has no problem doing software mixing to provide developers with effectively 4, 6 and even 8 channels of PCM audio for soundtracks and effects. Not as smooth sound, but totally sufficient.