Fuck the Super Game Boy: Now you’re playing with power–SUPER POWER!

Now let’s talk about what the Super Game Boy could have done, but didn’t.

While it was certainly the primary feature that it was marketed with, the Super Game Boy could do more than just colourize. On top of the single cartridge multiplayer mentioned previously, it had several ways that it could take advantage of the Super Nintendo’s far superior hardware.

But let me guess– nothing ever did?

The most prominent of which was the ability to play music or sound samples using the Super Nintendo hardware, which had significantly more sophisticated audio hardware. I’m not going to go into too much detail here, because frankly, it’s a little bit out of my area of expertise. But I’ll provide a fairly obvious example from one of the dozen or so games that did provide Super Game Boy-specific music: Animaniacs.

For your comparison, the title menu music, as heard on a Game Boy:

And the title menu music as heard on a Super Game Boy:1

Animaniacs actually has a complete Super Game Boy soundtrack, which is fairly unusual. More common were just including voice samples– as Donkey Kong ‘94 did, for example.

Why didn’t more games do that?

Because cartridge space was at a premium. Donkey Kong '94, for instance, uses a 4-megabit (or 512 kilobyte) cartridge.2 Larger cartridges were more expensive, and that’s not a lot of space to work with. Fitting two seperate soundtracks, one much larger than a normal Game Boy soundtrack would be, doesn’t come at an insignificant cost.

Another thing that doesn’t come at an insignificant cost: actually composing new music for the SNES. Animaniacs is a port of a Genesis game, so the higher quality sound already existed.3 If DK'94 had included SNES music for the whole game, not only would it have taken up much more space on the cartridge, but it would’ve needed entirely new renditions to be done, rather than being able to get away with modifying original console music.

More impressive than using the Super Nintendo’s hardware for music, however, is using it for graphics. Theoretically, the Super Game Boy had insane amounts of potential available in what’s called OBJ4 mode.5

OBJ mode works in the same way that the borders do. It takes bitmap data (ie, sprites), and instead of drawing them to the pre-colourized Game Boy video memory, it draws them into the SNES’s video memory.

In case that doesn’t make much sense, here’s essentially how the Super Game Boy renders things:
1. The background layer is drawn to the Game Boy’s video memory.
2. The sprite layer is drawn to the Game Boy’s video memory.
3. The Game Boy’s memory is drawn onto the center of the Super Nintendo’s video memory.
4. The screen is colourized.
5. All SNES graphics, including the border, are drawn to the Super Nintendo’s video memory.

In simple terms: remember what I said about the Super Game Boy being unable to individually colour sprites? That wasn’t actually true. Using OBJ mode, independantly coloured sprites can be drawn on top of everything else.

Amazing! So what games actually took advantage of this crazy magic?

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one game that’s actually used it: Mario’s Picross.

And if you think that’s disappointing, wait until you find out what it was used for!

Most Super Game Boy games that considered colourization important6 simply locked out the user from setting custom palettes. Mario’s Picross doesn’t. This is what happens when you change the palette:

Yes, that’s right. Mario’s Picross uses OBJ mode, the mostly unused amazing superpowers of the Super Game Boy, with the power to completely bypass the colourization restrictions, to prevent the player from recolouring the logo on the title screen.

Seriously.

This is the only documented use of it.

Okay, so are there any other insane things you could do with the Super Game Boy that took advantage of the SNES?

There’s one other crazy thing, that only a single Super Game Boy game ever did. Here’s what Space Invaders looks like normally,7 in “Super Game Boy mode”:

In order to mimick an actual Space Invaders machine, it uses the colourization in the same way that a real Space Invaders machine used colourized cellophane overlays. Now, here’s “Arcade mode”:

How the fuck does the Super Game Boy do THAT?!

The effect here is completely impossible on a Super Game Boy game, plain and simple. Take note of the resolution, the transparencies, and the massive palette.

Space Invaders actually has an entirely seperate SNES game on the cartridge. Arcade mode loads that game into the Super Nintendo’s memory, and then it runs like any other Super Nintendo game; once it’s loaded, it bypasses the Super Game Boy completely.

It’s the only game that ever did this, and it’s fairly obvious why: it requires the development of an entirely separate game. Since the SNES and Game Boy are completely different architectures,8 and obviously radically different hardware-wise, they couldn’t even share any code.9 Not only is this insane for development, but it obviously would take up a lot of room on a cartridge where space is at a premium. It makes sense that the only game that did it was one that was incredibly simple.

What should be apparent, though, is that the Super Game Boy was a lot more powerful than most assumed it to be. In the next and last post, I’m going to look at how it might’ve been used to its full potential, and talk about why it failed.

Next up: Kirby’s Dreamland 2.


  1. And only on a Super Game Boy. While modern Game Boy emulators have no problem with screen borders or colourization, none have implemented any other Super Game Boy functions. Currently, only BSNES is capable of emulating the Super Game Boy completely, but it’s very resource intensive. ↩︎

  2. See Mario Wiki. ↩︎

  3. The Super Game Boy version’s title screen is an entirely original composition. The rest of the game’s music, as far as I can tell, is translated from the Genesis version; although there are obviously some discrepancies, since SNES has very different audio hardware. I don’t know enough about old console audio systems to go into more detail here. ↩︎

  4. Refering to how the SNES handles graphics: there are several BG layers, for background components, plus a single OBJ layer, for sprites. ↩︎

  5. The painfully technical details↩︎

  6. And, for no apparent reason, the haphazardly colourized second two Donkey Kong Land games. ↩︎

  7. It actually gives you several options for colourization: black and white, “colour” (pictured), and “cellophane”, which makes the colourization region borders more pronounced, to add realism. ↩︎

  8. The SNES using some insane Nintendo custom processor something fairly obscure, and the Game Boy using the ubiquitous Zilog Z80. ↩︎

  9. You could share graphics, however. A bitmap is a bitmap, on any system. ↩︎