gba
10
8mb
Music made for the Nintendo GameBoy Advance, featuring samples on top of the classic GameBoy soundchip.
Submission should be able to play back on real hardware (or in an emulator)!
::|CONTENTS
- Tools
- Restrictions on submit
- Playback (for voting)
- See also
The
GameBoy Advance (often called simply the GBA) was a portable gaming console released by Nintendo in 2001 that succeeded the GameBoy Color. In addition to being backwards compatible with the original
GameBoy - and thus containing its soundchip - the GBA allowed for crunchy sampled stereo audio. This could be used both to play back full audio streams and, frequently, to play back sequences of samples that were software-mixed by the CPU (much like the N64). As such there is no "standard" singular audio driver for the system, and there are fewer hard restrictions to deal with. However it also means there is no gold standard tool for the format.
You can read more about the system's audio specifications on the
GameBoy Advance page.
Tools
As mentioned, the toolkit for making GBA music is varied and far from ideal. Your main options are module conversion tools:
-
Maxmod - converts .s3m, .xm, .mod and .it files to
.gba ROMs; can only use the PCM channels, i.e. no GameBoy PSG
-
Krawall - converts .s3m and .xm files to
.bin ROMs; can only use the PCM channels, i.e. no GameBoy PSG
-
GBT Player - converts .s3m and .mod files to
.gba ROMs; can only use the GameBoy PSG by itself, but when using .s3m, it can be combined with either Maxmod or Krawall to use both the GBA PCM and the GB PSG (
link)
There are also native (hardware) tools:
-
Furious Advance Tracker, an LSDJ-inspired native GBA tracker, for which you can submit
.sav (this tracker includes some samples). You can also modify an existing Furious Advance Tracker ROM to use a custom set of samples. If you do so submit a
.zip archive instead, containing both the modified ROM (
.gba) and the
.sav file.
-
nanoloop two, a sequencer with a minimal interface (download the "Demo ROM" and be sure to see the controls in the manual linked above the ROM), for which you can submit
.sav (uses GameBoy PSG only)
-
Chiptrack - a multiplatform sequencer with web, desktop and GBA versions. Uses only the GB PSG, you can submit
.sav. It is still in development and it doesn't seem to work well on all platforms yet, if possible opt for the GBA or the Windows version.
Restrictions on submit
Submission should be a working GBA ROM in the form of .gba or .bin,
or in the case of the hardware tools, a .sav containing your song (be sure to save your work within the tracker).
You cannot submit LSDJ .savs here, use a GBA tool.
Note that use of the "DirectSound" sampled audio portion of the GBA's capabilities is not required, ergo you can create pure GameBoy music in this format as long as you still submit one of the required filetypes.
Playback (for voting)
Open .gba/.bin files in your GBA emulator of choice, such as
VBA-M (a modern fork of the classic Visual Boy Advance) or
mGBA.
For .sav files, name both the .sav and its associated .gba ROM the same thing and open the .gba ROM in your emulator of choice, like above. You may need to place the .sav in a particular directory for it to be read; check your emulator's settings to see where this might be.
See also
Many other helpful links for GBA development and other musicmaking tools (that don't produce valid submission types) can be found on the
GameBoy Advance lyceum page.
