Super Metroid Has Been Brought to the Game Boy Advance, and It Runs at 60 FPS

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.