When [Anton] picked up an old translucent purple Game Boy Color, he noticed a nearly complete lack of sound coming from the speaker. This simply would not do, so [Anton] replaced the speaker and soldered in a 2 Watt amp, making his Game Boy very loud indeed.
After cracking open his Game Boy, [Anton] noticed the speaker was rusted. He replaced it by soldering in a speaker from a Motorola cell phone, fixing the most immediate problem. After plugging in a few batteries, he still noticed a nearly complete lack of sound.
Turning to his electronics junk drawer, [Anton] pulled out a TI TPA2000D1 Class D amplifier. This tiny amplifier is able to provide 2 Watts to a speaker and is very power efficient given it’s Class D pedigree.
After making a PCB and wiring up his amp to the Game Boy’s circuit board, [Anton] spent a little time tracking down the source of some high-frequency hissing. As it turns out, the power regulators and converters on a 15-year old Game Boy aren’t of the highest quality, but after adding a few capacitors [Anton] got everything under control.
Now [Anton]’s Game Boy has very loud, crystal-clear sound. Considering the lengths chiptune artists take modifying old ‘brick’ style game boys for use with Little Sound DJ or nanoloop, [Anton]’s build could become a worthwhile modification for musicians looking for a little more oomph to their performance.
Motorola at least used to be putting these funny speakers in their phones that had a physical resonant mode around 100-150Hz (so they wouldn’t need a separate vibrator motor). Any idea if this is one of them?
I doubt that it is. But it’s vibrating at max volume =)
Those gameboy’s were plenty loud (oh how I still recall that pokemon music being so loud a decade later).
He probably just put in the wrong ohm speaker in.
Given the state he found the speaker in, it’s also possible there was some degradation elsewhere in the signal path.
Either way, fixing the hiss is a good thing.
Same 8 ohms speaker. Signal path is ok too, it’s just not enough volume for me in the noisy environment.
A note to any chip musicians using lsdj on an EMS USB cartridge, there is a much easier way of producing a clean output from your precious ‘.savs’. The emulator BGB can output each lasdj track as a separate .wav!
http://bgb.bircd.org/
You will also need the EMS software (comes with cartridge)to extract your data. You should probably do this anyway as as back up….Every hex value is a piece of your soul, don’t lose them!
If you dont have one of these carts, try them out! They are cheap (actually available), work great, and have two scenes so you can load different roms in one cart!
http://www.nonelectronics.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2&products_id=112&zenid=ea5b964dfffa5daaf239db61fc775020
Happy Mixing!
am i the only one wondering WHY a gameboy produces andor uses 15 volts???
or did i read that correctly? …
im new to the insides of a gameboy …
this is probably for lcd driving
The schematic here – http://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/DMG_Schematics – shows that at least the original DMG needed -19V to drive its old screen. I bet the GBC also needed some higher voltage for LCD drive.
The GB Pocket also needed 5V for its antiquated CPU if I recall. The transistors wouldn’t work at even the 3V max the AAAs could put out.
New Mod PCB made to production. Take a look and pre order http://veretenenko.ru/anton/gbamp/