I got this thing at a Gamestop for something like $30 back before the GBASP came out. I don't recall there being any brands on the box, and there's none on the unit itself either. It came with a mini phillips and gamebit screw driver. a replacement back for the GBA, and the unit that plugs into the GBA.
This is my GBA with the replacement back installed. The extra door is for the video connector.Beside that and a different warning label it's nearly identical to the original.
The connector, nothing special really. Though it's surprisingly sturdy.
This is the gadget that plugs into the GBA. You can only power the GBA through the DC adapter when you use it. Which is kinda a pain because the cord for that is considerably shorter than the video cord, but it's not a huge issue.
here's it all put together. It is a bit on the bulky side, it's not that bad, but it could be considerably better.
The picture it puts out isn't the greatest, but it's passable. It has composite, and s-video out. Here I'm using s-video (for the first time actually). It puts out a pretty clear image, but it's not as good in motion. It's not very visible in these pictures but there's a sort of vertical scanline looking pattern over the screen, and the colors are a little off. I just got Rebelstar, so it's not very noticeable to me, but I could really tell on Advance Wars. Also the aspect ratio is a little off, again not enough to ruin the game, but if you're looking for it you'll notice. There picture switch on the unit will enlarge the image some, but it doesn't go fullscreen.
The lighting isn't good enough here to see it, but the GBA screen does work simultaneously.
An oddity is that if you turn off the GBA, but the the adapter it will keep showing the last image on the tv.
Just for comparision here's some pics of GBA on tv via the GC Gameboy Player, and by a emulator via hdmi.
The GBplayer has similar screen scaling options, and in general it just looks better. However, as far as i can tell it is always doing some kind of filtering (here it's set on sharp). This isn't the best comparison though because it's connected by composite, while the gba-tv adapter is over s-video.
This is Rebelstar running on VBAm set to fullscreen with no filtering. The colors don't seem quite as vibrant, but that's most likely just the video card settings on my pc, not the emulator. The picture doesn't do it justice, GB games look really damn good running on the tv like this. It's a shame Nintendo hasn't put these games on the VC, they scale up to tv size amazingly well.
Even though it's a questionable Chinese third party adapterthis thing works pretty well. I never cared much for using it with more action oriented games because it's not the most comfortable, but i got quite a bit of use out of it playing Advance Wars. It's not perfect, but it's more portable than a Gamecube, and I think it came out well before the gbplayer. I'm still rather surprised that I got it at a Gamestop, it really doesn't seem like them to sell something that requires taking apart your system to use.
