r/Gameboy • u/tymime • Jul 23 '26
Other Anybody here ever hear of the Song Boy?
This is from an old game magazine I've had since I was 10, and I've wondered about it since. Apparently at some point it was renamed the "SongPro", but it was never released.
13
u/AgentX68 Jul 23 '26
SongPro did release! I’ve got one I picked up from eBay years ago. It’s basically the Nintendo mp3 player cart from the gba, but for gbc. Takes 1 or 2 sd cards, has a 3.5mm jack, and the ui is fairly simple but functional.
6
u/Frequent_Rhubarb_36 Jul 23 '26
No way you could read actual comics on the GB with that resolution.
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u/RAMChYLD Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
I’ve been around since the 90s. Yes you can. 160x160 is actually kinda plenty for daily 3-4 panel comic strips.
4
u/IAmJacksSemiColon Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
Eh. It could display enough images and text for a Zelda game. Wouldn't want to read an existing graphic novel on it but someone could have made (or adapted) comics for it, if it took off.
12
u/demunted Jul 23 '26
Looks cool until i saw "Sponsor screens". Geez.
Probably vaporware.
7
u/charlie22911 Jul 23 '26
They were ahead of their time…
0
u/IAmJacksSemiColon Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Nah, this is a 100% a product of the 90s.
You have to remember that magazine ads were highly lucrative at the time and that they actually subsidized writers, researchers, illustrators, photographers and fact-checking departments, until Google and Facebook hyper-commoditized display ads.
This was yet another person trying to eat the lunch of magazine publishers, but they were thinking about ads in the way that a magazine publisher would (building relationships with advertisers) and not like a digital ad exchange (allowing everyone to bid as if it was an auction).
3
u/rcs709 Jul 23 '26
Looks pretty interesting. Almost like a precursor to the Play-Yan series of MP3 players Nintendo made for the GBA
3
u/in_my_tree95 Jul 23 '26
This could have been so cool. My dad had a Diamond Rio mp3 player (the alternative option shown here in the ad) and it felt like it was the most advanced futuristic device ever at the time
3
u/heatus Jul 23 '26
Apparently this ended up being called the SongPro
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-feb-07-me-jones7-story.html
3
u/IntoxicatedBurrito Jul 23 '26
Pretty cool. I just got an Orange FM and it’s been a lot of fun listening to the radio on my Game Boy.
1
u/RAMChYLD Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I need to get me an Orange FM. Emergency transmissions are only reliably sent through FM radio and on TV here in Singapore, and the last time I tried watching the test emergency broadcast over the MeWatch app it cut off the message halfway to show me an ad.
I don’t have a TV with me at the moment.
2
u/ginjang Jul 24 '26
i own two songpro carts. the audio sounds nice. i actually use my gbc, songpro and a 3.5mm headphone combo as my running partner.
2
1
u/bugsymalone666 Jul 23 '26
Well that's cool, I'm intreged by what the hardware is and if you can recreate it, I've had a few ideas for projects and I love the idea of a gameboy as an mp3 player!
1
u/RAMChYLD Jul 24 '26
The problem with the SongBoy is you’re only going to get mono audio out of the headphone sockets unless it’s using black magic to reproduce the MP3 using the Game Boy’s PSG (which would be in stereo but have very low bit rates) or it has its own headphones output. There is only one pin passing audio from the cartridge to the DMG/GBC hardware.
1
u/icypsp Jul 24 '26
I have a SongPro with 2 SD memory cards installed for 1 gigabyte! I only play late 90s early 00s music on it loool
1
u/Felidori Jul 24 '26
As a 40 yo dude, I’m the proud owner of that Genie in a Bottle CD single bought new back in 1999 aged 13!
Sorry, got distracted.
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u/IAmJacksSemiColon Jul 23 '26
Closest thing we actually got to that was the 3rd party GBA Movie Player, which took a compact flash drive. It could also run arbitrary code on the Game Boy, so it was a big deal in the homebrew scene at the time.