Hacking Game Boy For Sound

[Gijs] cracked open his Game Boy and added some parts to give him more sound synthesis control. He uses Little Sound Dj (LSDj), a popular Game Boy program used to pump out those classic 8-bit sounds. The unit seen above and heard in the clip after the break has an added potentiometer and circuit board. He’s got a few other hacked Game Boys on his site as well, including an Arduino generating random music on the handheld.

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/9778795]

8 thoughts on “Hacking Game Boy For Sound

  1. Interesting. Port the 8-bit to MIDI and use flash memory to store sample libraries for a complete new-and-improved sound. That would be a fun project…GameBoy with 44KHz thematic samples, surround sound and EAX. ;p

  2. @supershwa: Actually, there are several options for MIDI on Game Boys. The LSDJMC2 and Arduinoboy in particular. Also, LSDJ already supports samples on the PCM wave channel. It evn has the ability to play two samples at once on a single channel! That said, the samples are of astonishingly low quality and have to be very short. It also takes an enormous amount of the original Game Boy’s processing power.

    Also @everyone: The Game Boy is 8-bit, its sound it 4-bit…

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