When Nintendo got rid of the headphone jack

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 10:54 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #14

arm wrote: post #11

I remember this as well (I still have mine in fact!). However, I didn’t really care that much considering how much better the Game Boy Advance SP was than all the previous Game Boys. It was the first Game Boy to have a backlit screen, which meant I could finally easily sneak and play on it in the night without alerting my parents (instead of trying to do the same with the much less effective wormlight accessory I had…

I still have my GBA SP, too, but I'm pretty sure part of why charging it is so finicky now is that I used the headphone adapter so often. Which is a bummer. But it still charges with a little bit of a wiggle and I've got a flash cart with a bunch of translated versions of Japanese games. It's still a bunch of fun and I bring it when I fly.

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 11:00 AM UTC

jaimex2 wrote: post #20

chris_wot wrote: post #3

The difference here is that the primary purpose of an iPhone is to make phone calls. And uses multimedia, like music. Leading to this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z_wImaGRkNY

I'm starting to see a trend in the comments where anyone who actually posts something rational that makes sense gets down voted. He is right, no one used the Gameboy as a media player.

Post by lubos » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 11:13 AM UTC

clw8 wrote: post #70

byuu wrote: post #23

Bandai did the same with the Wonderswan devices, which competed against the Game Boy Color and Advance. The device was only released in Japan around '98 - '01. And so now, if you want to use headphones with it (and you do; as not only do you get stereo instead of monaural sound; you get an extra channel of audio so you'll be missing certain sound effects in some games without them!), you get to buy one of these price…

Are those the cables that come stock? If so I've got some Ebay'ing to do...

Post by shasheene » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 11:48 AM UTC

justinlardinois wrote: post #40

shasheene wrote: post #12

This reminds me of the "feature phone" era in the early 2000s, where every phone had a proprietary charging port, proprietary headphone jack and the removable memory interface was not yet standardized on MicroSD. Thankfully European Union pushed for MicroUSB standardization. While vendors (like Apple) can still get around it by bundling an adapter in European markets, it was enough to push the entire industry to stan…

> the original GBA used a certain proprietary charging port I wouldn't call a AA battery compartment a "proprietary charging port" :)

Post by byuu » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 11:51 AM UTC

djhworld wrote: post #54

byuu wrote: post #23

Bandai did the same with the Wonderswan devices, which competed against the Game Boy Color and Advance. The device was only released in Japan around '98 - '01. And so now, if you want to use headphones with it (and you do; as not only do you get stereo instead of monaural sound; you get an extra channel of audio so you'll be missing certain sound effects in some games without them!), you get to buy one of these price…

The Gamecube example is interesting. From the Wikipedia page: > The only cables that can output a 480p signal from the GameCube are the official Nintendo-brand YPBPR component cables, available in both RCA[note 1] and D-Terminal[note 2] variations. These cables are equipped with a unique digital-to-analog converter developed by Nintendo which has not been reproduced by any third party company. So the adapter is propr…