I wonder, has anyone ever made a clone of the GBA that has a nicer screen that you can actually see without standing on the surface of the sun? Or do you just have to play the games on a GBA SP if you want any form of lighting at all?
It's a shame the backlit (as opposed to frontlit) SP is so rare.
I guess a super game boy in one of those portable SNES clones would get you gb games with a backlight on the go but I dunno
I just want a handheld system that plays gb/gbc/gba games from the actual cartridges and has a backlight
bonus points if it can also play from roms on an sd card or something though
long, wishful thinking re: gba clone
I'm quite sure we're not the first ones to have this thought but a small portable device dedicated to playing classic portable games would be a very nice thing to have
I bet people have done it before but probably went the emulation route which inevitably causes problems, and probably didn't make good enough quality housings and stuff so it would end up feeling plasticky and cheap
i'd want to make something that uses a proper housing from like a gba or something, has an actual cartridge slot and uses actual game boy hardware (or SOC versions thereof), but with upgraded visual quality due to using an actual backlit screen
maybe make it so it can do some other games too, maybe NES and SNES and SMS and Genesis and game gear (obviously not with original cartridges of those, the whole shell of the thing is smaller than an NES or even SNES cartridge)
@Felthry there's a drop-in replacement screen for the gbc https://www.mw-embedded.com/product/gameboy-color-replacement-lcd-module/
@noiob that actually looks really good and we might get one sometime
@Felthry it adds a bit of extra bezel
I first saw it in this video, there's some good footage of it near the end: https://youtu.be/WG8loyh-kFw
@noiob yeah that's really nice
we have an old broken game boy color sitting around somewhere that we need to replace the speaker on
might end up replacing the screen too now!
*yes, you can play gba games on a DS or DS Lite but you can't play gb/gbc games on those, so the backlit SP is the only official way to play gameboy or gameboy color cartridges with a backlight excepting the really rare game boy light that I think was japan only and still didn't do gbc games
**i'm not counting the game boy player or the super game boy because those are not portable like the original was