Comment by cubefox

> With the GBA, the original GBA screen and the first gen GBA SP had very washed out colors and not saturated at all. The Mario ports to the GBA looked doubly since they desaturated their colors and were shown on a desaturated screen. I've heard that the real reason the colors were desaturated was because the first GBA model didn't have a backlight so the colors were lightened to be more visible,

That's certainly the case. The super low screen brightness of the first GBA was a major problem, because you often literally couldn't see things properly under less than perfect ambient light. So compensating for low brightness was more important than compensating for low color saturation, which is merely an aesthetic issue.