Today’s super little NeoCities article is about a project from developer Nick Desaulniers, who’s managed to get the original Super Metroid running natively on the Game Boy Advance.
Unlike earlier fan projects that recreated the game using Metroid: Zero Mission’s engine, this one takes the reconstructed code from the original SNES release and adapts it to run directly on the GBA’s hardware, without relying on emulation. According to the developer’s testing, every room can run at 60 FPS, which is quite an achievement for a handheld from 2001.
The amount of work involved in adapting the graphics, sound, controls and even the atmospheric effects for such different hardware is impressive. Desaulniers has documented the process in considerable detail, including how he used Claude to help with development, and I’ve included some of his comparison screenshots showing the challenges and improvements along the way.
As always, I just love seeing people continue to push these old handhelds in unexpected directions, and the thought of playing the original Super Metroid on a real GBA is interesting, to see done.
Something else worth mentioning is the role AI played in development. Desaulniers has publicly described using Claude to help port the game, and has published an unusually thorough account of how the port was created, including the technical problems encountered and the methods used to identify and resolve them. Given how frequently AI-assisted development comes up in homebrew discussions lately, I think that transparency is worth acknowledging. The project’s source code and development history are also publicly available for anyone interested in examining the work.
I appreciate the honesty at least.
All I did was scan for AI then I saw claud haha. Seems a lot of these breakthroughs lately have been with AI. Bout the only good thing it’s been doing lately.
Machine-executable code is cold structure within an unreadable mess. LLMs are really good at sorting that out.
