[daneel_w]

Agreed. I spent a lot of time programming the GBA in the early 2000s (back when the state of the art devkit was a flash cartridge writer with parallel cable...) and I consider it the last "grounded" console that Nintendo made, where you immediately and directly get to touch hardware right off the bat, without any gyrations. After having worked with the SNES in the 90s the GBA was a very familiar and pleasant platform to experience, in many ways similar to and built upon the SNES' foundation.

[mid-kid]

I've never coded for SNES, but the GBA having access to a mainline, modern C compiler is a massive buff. Also, emulators for it have always been available on practically any computer, console and mobile phone, and there's many so-called "emulation handhelds" that bring its (and similar) form-factor handheld devices to the market. If you really need an upgraded OG experience, many upgrade kits for the handheld exist as well.

None of this fixes the audio, but it sure gets damn close.

[emptybits]

Just curious what you mean by "fixing the audio"? In GBA emulation or on the hardware?

I'm aware that if you need/want PCM audio, there's going to be mixing, probably with a software library, and significant CPU use for it. Is emulated GBA audio buggy?

One of my first gigs was Game Boy and Game Gear programming. I know the GBA allows DMG audio compatibility and, with all its constraints, well it sure does keep things simple. And emulation is reliable AFAIK.

[mid-kid]

I see what happened, I was replying to a different comment, that did mention the GBA audio, when I wrote that, but somehow ended up replying to this one.

This comment explains it better than I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708201