So if you read my last blog entry, I briefly went over the fact that I recorded my gba sp using tin foil, paper and tape and did not go into much more detail than that cause I felt like it did not really fit into that blog entry topic. However, it is such an absurd thing that it may just be funny to look at what the hell I ended up doing to get that 3 minute test recording for my comparison.
Disclaimer, do NOT attempt anything like this or you may end up breaking your devices or burning your house down. This really just was what I consider a funny idea that I was crazy enough to go with just for some short simple tests.
If you are wondering, why dont I just plug a 3.5mm cable into a headphone out, in case you didnt know, the gba sp by default does not come with a headphone out, instead you get these ports:
The one relevant for this is the one on the left next to my thumb, lets quickly check out its pinout (image from https://www.instructables.com/id/Charging-a-gameboy-advance-sp-with-no-charger/):
So relevant for us is to first of all make it "detect" headphones which is easy enough, just shove a piece of tin foil into the upper left, just to bridge pin 1 with the outer shield.
Then next up, pin 2 for the left channel, pin 4 for the right channel and pin 5 for audio ground will be needed. For all this I just ripped off some tin foil I had laying around, some paper from I think some battery pack or something and some tape, ending up with this beautiful selection of items:
The paper just having the purpose here of making sure to not touch the outer shielding, we dont want that to happen. Well, with this sloppy mess slapped together in 2 minutes, time to shove it into that gba sp port:
There we go, now we have the relevant audio channels put onto tin foil of all things 
Let me show this from a probably better angle so you can see how it lines up now:
There we go, now, how exactly does this help me in recording from it? Well, lets have a quick look at a standard 3.5mm stereo audio jack so you can see where this is going:
Would you look at that, it *almost* seems like I planned for this to line up with what we have going on, well now lets see how this jack fits into the ""adapter"" from the previous picture:
And there you have it, it indeed touches the exact pins it needs to, now it was just a matter for me to hold that monster in my hand, push down on the 3.5mm jack connection with my hand and wiggle it around until everything got a solid connection and then not move a muscle for 3 minutes recording the stereo out of the gba sp, in fact I did that for more than once, I ended up making 3 separate recordings from the gba sp to confirm all my results were accurate and also then plugged this ""adapter"" into 2 separate nintendo ds systems which happen to have this same port as well as a regular headphone out so I then also could verify that both this port and the headphone output are identical and indeed, both put out the same audio as I also showed in my last blog entry, meaning it worked out exactly as I had hoped
So in the end, I suppose this just shows that even without any proper adapter, proper copper wire, soldering equipment or anything like that its still possible to make something like this happen, sure it really is just something you can do for testing and should be very careful with, never try and use something like tin foil for anything with serious electrical current or you'll probably burn your house down because its pretty simple for tin foil to get hot and throw sparks and fun things like that.
I hope you had a good laugh about this 2 minute idea of mine and did not take this serious in any way, I felt like this was just so absurd that it was worth sharing this free gba sp headphone ""adapter"" replacement.
Disclaimer, do NOT attempt anything like this or you may end up breaking your devices or burning your house down. This really just was what I consider a funny idea that I was crazy enough to go with just for some short simple tests.
If you are wondering, why dont I just plug a 3.5mm cable into a headphone out, in case you didnt know, the gba sp by default does not come with a headphone out, instead you get these ports:
Then next up, pin 2 for the left channel, pin 4 for the right channel and pin 5 for audio ground will be needed. For all this I just ripped off some tin foil I had laying around, some paper from I think some battery pack or something and some tape, ending up with this beautiful selection of items:
Let me show this from a probably better angle so you can see how it lines up now:
So in the end, I suppose this just shows that even without any proper adapter, proper copper wire, soldering equipment or anything like that its still possible to make something like this happen, sure it really is just something you can do for testing and should be very careful with, never try and use something like tin foil for anything with serious electrical current or you'll probably burn your house down because its pretty simple for tin foil to get hot and throw sparks and fun things like that.
I hope you had a good laugh about this 2 minute idea of mine and did not take this serious in any way, I felt like this was just so absurd that it was worth sharing this free gba sp headphone ""adapter"" replacement.
