Gameboy Advance (Classic) - Prosound Mod (Page 1 of 2)

Hey bro.

I haven't taken one apart in a while, but in theory it should be almost identical to pro sounding a Game Boy Color: You just have to connect the three points to the three points on the volume potentiometer.

I haven't been able to find my original GBA, so I can't take it apart and look, but I'm not sure how much room there is internally if you want to panel mount the jack(s). You might have to do the hanging pigtail/dongle like Trash80 did on the very first pro-sound, or like Low-Gain did on his SPs you can see in the recent interview pictures with him.

I hope that was helpful. Post up in here if you find any guides or schematics!

Like I said, I don't have one with me to check out, but I'm pretty sure it's close to the Game Boy Color. They have the same sort of volume wheel:

There's a small board-mounted potentiometer on the bottom of the unit off to one side of the screen. This is a stereo potentiometer for controlling the strength of the signal going into the headphone preamp circuit, and it connects to the board at five points. One of these is ground, two are left and right going into the potentiometer, and two are left and right coming out of the potentiometer. You can identify which is which with a continuity test feature on a multimeter.

i thought there was a thread about this already... hmm. may be it was at 8bc. anyways. so soldering to the volume pot doesnt work to prosound gbas. that is because unlike the normal gameboys the amplifier (the noisey bg sound source) component comes before the volume pot. so... there are 2 resistors that come before that you can trace on the ciruit board that come before the amplifier. solder to those and add a jack and you got yourself a functioning gba prosound mod.
the problem is these ristors are tiny and come off really easy when heated really easy effectivly ffffffuuucking you shit up. also there isnt the option for volume control with the added jack.

if ou have hands of a surgeon you can probably pull it off but i have never seen or heard of anyone who has done it right.

good luck ya bunch of n00bs

the thing that people forget is that it is important to understand what is happening in these mods and how they work. prosound mods work by bypassing your audio signal past noisy components (amplifier) of the gameboy. the amplifer is made to prep the audio for headphones but in the process adds a litte background noise. going around this eliminates the noise but makes your signal not ideal for headphones tho it is perfectly suitable for other things.

fun fact. the original prosound was developed by the very talented trash 80 who was thinking about how to make gbcs sound better as the population of dmg modles deminished. that was a long time ago tho and you new guys probably werent around the chipscene for that... hell i wasnt even around for that yet.

i dont think there is an article to my knowledge.

After talking about a ProSound Mod for GBA, is there a good instruction online how to built a GBA SP Backlight into the GBA Classic, so it's frontlited?

Not bad, might work. Only missing some pictured instruction.
I'll give it a try when the GBA SP arrives here.

oh yes it did ^^^^.  Thanks for the info.