Ever find yourself in the middle of a Game Boy game and your hand cramps up? Save that sore wrist for something else because now you can hack the Game Boy Advance to add Rapid Fire for the B button. [William] has developed a way to do this by creating a simple circuit that generates a square wave on the B button when it is pressed. To do this hack all that was needed was a short shopping list of:
- A Couple NAND Gate ICs
- 2n2222 NPN Transistor
- 0.1uF ceramic capacitor
- A Switch
- 1M ohm resistor
- Some Thin Wire
After that you’re off to the races as [William] documents how he goes about transforming the Game Boy Advance and includes a ton of great pictures and a schematic. This operation ends with [William] placing the switch for Rapid Fire excellence next to the Right Bumper where it is inconspicuous and yet easy enough to access.
Via [HackedGadgets]
YIKES! That is the gobbiest ugly solder mess Ive seen in a while. Maybe this is better suited for “kludge-a-day”?
seems like “glued” not soldered ;)
but nice idea also
Agreed. Those solder joints need work.
“Save that sore wrist for something else” I lolled.
always nice to see more freeform solder jobs :P
Good to see some very simple electronics hacks from time to time!
“A couple NAND ICs”? I only see one.
second one is buried under the solder.
ZING!
There was a similar thread on rec.games.vectrex just recently. Here’s a circuit with just two transistors which might work on the GBA with some tweaks to the values: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.vectrex/msg/806a33aa9557a19a?dmode=source
@johannesburgel He uses a single IC with 3 NAND gates
I remember taking the small autofire circuit from a joystick and putting it in my Amiga mouse, with an on/off switch, so I could have autofire on Star Wars.
Ahh those were the days…
A better way would be a small micro controller, have it monitor the backlight button. If it senses a button pressed while holding the backlight button down, it triggers auto-fire on that button. Same method for turning it off. Should only take the same number of parts and maybe a 3/4 extra wires.