Making A Game Boy Color Louder

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.

11 thoughts on “Making A Game Boy Color Louder

  1. 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?

  2. 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!

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