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As well as being a total nerd over audio quality and headphones. I am also a big fan of video games. I was recently thinking about modifying my Game Boy Advance SP; inserting a better quality speaker than the crap that Nintendo put in there and modding the screen with a better backlight and better graphics.
What would be the perfect speaker that would fit in that little thing that would bring out those small little Mario "yah-hoos!" and fat little electronic VGM's*?
That's not practical, youd do better cracking it open, finding the wires to the speaker, cutting them, and putting a makeshift 3.5 mm jack on there. If your good with soldering and reverse engineering (maybe not the right term here, you get the gist) you could put a mini usb port on there to output a digital signal to a portable DAC if you have one. this is all excessive though, you aren't going to get good sound out of a game boy, a full song, at 128 kbps is about 3.5 mb. The biggest game cartridges according to wiki are about 128 MB, i doubt the designers are going to be concerned with giving you anything resembling a quality audio file with those storage limitations. Also, upgrading your screen / graphics does no good. Those games are meant to be played at a fixed resolution, with certain hardware. you dont buy a 12,000 dollar cray supercomputer to play games from '89 (actually you probably cant play any games at all on a cray, but thats beside the point). The designers dont include any magic switches or enhanced resolutions for anyone obsessive enough to upgrade their gameboy. My advice? buy a psp if you care about sound / graphics quality.
First post for me. I'm a lurker (currently considering which portable gear could rock my HD-25 1 II to their fullest) and stumbled upon your thread and thought you might like my input.
I'm also an avid gamer, and especially a retro-gamer. I took appart my Gameboy Advance SP a couple of days ago in order to change its shell. Replacing the internal speaker is actually very easy. The speaker is not soldered to the motherboard, it just makes contact with it, and rests inside a cutout in the shell. You could easely replace it, or maybe add some wires to make yourself an analog output.
Regarding the screen, there are actually two versions of the Gameboy Advance SP, and the difference is the screen. The first one, called AGS-001 is the most common Gameboy there is, and has a rather dim screen. The button in the center of the console allows you to change the backlight and turn it off. Another version, called AGS-101, has a real backlit screen, and the difference is stunning. Depending where you are, it can be a little tricky to find one in proper conditions. I'm in France, and it cost me around 70 EUR to get one shipped from the US.
Here's a video showing the difference between the two screens :
As you can see there's also a great difference regarding the blacks. On the AGS-001, the blacks have a blue tone to them.
Problem with the DS is that it has an aweful grip compared to the GBA SP. Plus it's bigger, and finally you can play original Gameboy games on the GBA SP :)
Why did you bother replacing that speaker though? I see the difference with the screen, and I guess I was wrong about there not being a practical way to improve the screen, but most of us have a decent pair of portables that we could just plug into a 3.5.
