Gaming Hacks

Compose Music on Your Game Boy

When you can’t take your studio with you, turn your portable into a studio.

Handheld gaming devices aren’t just for children or for playing games. They can potentially be productive work devices! Okay, perhaps that’s hard to swallow, but you can use your Game Boy to make music. One of the top Game Boy utilities is Little Sound Dj.

Introducing Little Sound Dj

Johan Kotlinski’s Little Sound Dj (or LSDj) is very flexible and can enhance your musical ideas. It’s also very fast to use once you’ve learned how. Feature-wise, it boasts a soft synthesizer with resonant filters, sampled drum kits, and an internal speech synthesizer. All in all, it’s more like a portable music studio than anything else.

Little Sound Dj cartridges are hard to find these days, but occasionally show up on eBay. During the last year, used cartridges sold for between $150 and $350. You can also download a free demo version from http://www.littlesounddj.com/. There’s hope for some kind of reissue sometime in the future, though it’s likely it’ll still lack Nintendo’s imprimatur.

Alternatives to LSDj

The Nintendo Game Boy Camera ( [Hack #21] ) also features a small DJ game with very basic sequencing and sound-programming capabilities. Although it’s really a toy, this program aroused a lot of interest in making music on the Game Boy.

Jester Interactive developed the Nintendo-approved Pocket Music program for the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. It is more capable than the Game Boy ...