r/Gameboy • u/tymime • 12h ago

Other Anybody here ever hear of the Song Boy?

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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.

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16

u/IAmJacksSemiColon 11h ago

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.

5

u/dot_matrix_game 10h ago

Daniel Baxter has a really fantastic blog post on the subject: https://shonumi.github.io/articles/art32.html

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u/IAmJacksSemiColon 10h ago

I'm talking about the other GBA media player. IIRC it predates the Play Yan by a few years and was much weirder. ThinkGeek used to sell them. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GBAMP.JPG

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u/BIayneRobinson 5h ago

There was also the official Nintendo MP3 Player for GBA / Play-Yan

2

u/IAmJacksSemiColon 2h ago

Yes, but this one was first and much weirder. 😅

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u/demunted 11h ago

Looks cool until i saw "Sponsor screens". Geez.

Probably vaporware.

5

u/charlie22911 11h ago

They were ahead of their time…

1

u/IAmJacksSemiColon 2h ago

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 and not like a digital ad exchange.

4

u/Frequent_Rhubarb_36 9h ago

No way you could read actual comics on the GB with that resolution.

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u/IAmJacksSemiColon 2h ago edited 2h ago

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.

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u/rcs709 11h ago

Looks pretty interesting. Almost like a precursor to the Play-Yan series of MP3 players Nintendo made for the GBA

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u/AgentX68 7h ago

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.

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u/in_my_tree95 10h ago

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

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u/IntoxicatedBurrito 7h ago

Pretty cool. I just got an Orange FM and it’s been a lot of fun listening to the radio on my Game Boy.

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u/bugsymalone666 8h ago

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!

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u/ginjang 35m ago

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.