Author Topic: Pocket Music gameplay footages (Read 1525 times)

DJ_Omnimaga · « **on:** May 28, 2008, 04:38:26 pm »

I wonder if anyone ever seen this before? It is the first time there are gameplay footage posted online though I'm sure. In 2002 Jester Interactive released two versions of Music Generator for the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance. I doubt anyone would want to use this though, which probably explains why it is so hard to find and why it was only released in Europe, because of the horrible sound quality and the limitations. For the GB version you have two sound channels for percussions, two channels for melody and one for BPM. The melody and bass sounds as well as some hihat sounds are pretty much just NES/Commodore 64 style sounds. For the GBA version you have 6 sound channels for music and one for something else I don't remember. However even if sound quality is better in overall it still sounds quite bad, and being limited to 6 channels, a small selection of samples and bad controls it isn't really worth it really. There are even places saying the GBC version is better than the GBA one, even if sound quality is worse and there are less channels. Anyway I wanted to share videos of the gameplay with you just so you see how it looks like/sound (You will need Winamp or Windows Media Player to watch them):

pillagemyvillage · « **Reply #1 on:** August 10, 2008, 09:21:56 am »

lol!
that was funny.
i cant believe that anybody would use that!
if i bought that and had only 6 channels with bad sound quality it wouldnt be long before i gave up.
some mobile phones have better mixing studios!
however i would love to hear someones tracks on here. that would be cool to see what they can do with it!

DJ_Omnimaga · « **Reply #2 on:** August 10, 2008, 07:31:02 pm »

yeah, personally it wont be from me because of the bad sound quality (thanks to the GBA, even SNES/Sega Genesis ports on the GBA sounds like crap). If the first one had more channel I would prbly make some kind of NES music remix in it but now it's too limited. You have to sacrifice the bass when you want melody or vice versa and in the GBA version controls are weird and sound quality is just too bad

DJ Ryznup · « **Reply #3 on:** December 18, 2008, 09:18:59 am »

I have this but I only played around with it once. Then I just left it alone, I might mess with it again to create a song and upload it for fun, but other than that theres no way you can do anything serious with it.

TPT · « **Reply #4 on:** August 18, 2009, 10:17:52 am »

Ironically it was my interest in music for the Game Boy that brought me to this site.

I've been making music on the Game Boy for a couple of years. It was Pocket Music for the GBA that made me use Music on the PS1 and then I was drawn here

In the chiptune community, Pocket Music for the GBA is considered a whole lot worse than Pocket Music on the GBC. Simply because the sample quality is so bad. At least on the GBC the instruments on the two melody channels are not samples, so there's no horrible noise. I used Pocket Music for a while then gave it to my brother, who had a play around with it a couple of times before giving up on it as well.

Actually although Pocket Music on the GBC has 5 channels, the game boy only has 4. The wave channel can be made to play two samples at the same time.

I'm fairly sure nobody needed to know that, but since the topic was Game Boy oriented I felt the need to stick my nose in ;-)

After 2 years of using LSDJ to make music on the Game Boy, I've only just got round to using Pocket Music GBC. I'm liking it, but I have a question. Does anyone know of a way to take the edge off of the noise of the samples? A hardware solution that I could use live, like a noise gate or something? I'm afraid I have little knowledge of musical hardware

All help greatly appreciated.