We’ve all been there. You left your Walkman at home and only have your trusty Game Boy. You want to take a break and just listen to some tunes. What to do? [orangeglo] has the answer now with the Orange FM cartridge.
This prototype cart features an onboard antenna or can also use the 3.5 mm headphone/antenna port on the cartridge to boost reception with either a dedicated antenna or a set of headphones. Frequencies supported are 64 – 108 Mhz, and spacing can be set for 100 or 200 kHz to accomodate most FM broadcasts setups around the world.
Older Game Boys can support audio through the device itself, but Advances will need to use the audio port on the cartridge. The Super Game Boy can pipe audio to your TV though, which seems like a delightfully Rube Goldberg-ian way to listen to the radio. Did we mention it also supports RDS, so you’ll know what that catchy tune is? Try that FM Walkman!
Can’t decide between this and your other carts? Try this revolving multi-cart solution. Have a Game Boy that needs some restoration? If it’s due to electrolyte damage, maybe start here?
Heavy Sigh
All the cool radio hardware comes years after any content worth listening to.
Oh, I don’t know, there’s a Twins game this afternoon.
Is there a cartridge that turns the GameBoy into a cell phone (not a smart one unless you really have to)?
The microphone would be in the cartridge and you’d need to hold the GameBoy upside down to take a call, but why t.h. not?
Not sure, but the Handspring Visor PDA had a cell phone module.
Still better than using a NGage.
orangeglo here – thanks for the great writeup!
Thanks for the awesome project! All the documentation in the manual made it a breeze to write up!
Something like this would have been amazing back in the day.
Neat! I guess if anyone wanted more than FM, there’s already projects using the si4732 chips to draw from. But FM with RDS is already plenty cool given the gameboy aspect.
>The Super Game Boy can pipe audio to your TV though, which seems like a delightfully Rube Goldberg-ian way to listen to the radio. Did we mention it also supports RDS, so you’ll know what that catchy tune is? Try that FM Walkman!
A cassette walkman can be adapted to pipe the audio for a phone call through it, meaning if you were to call WWV, you could have a Rube Goldbergian talking clock. Or you could just make everyone around think you’re nuts for holding a conversation with a tape player, if you rather. (It’s a bit less impressive if you know that those adapters are effectively just a bluetooth headset crammed inside an empty cassette and you need a phone or other device in your pocket to work, but still.)
This cart uses the si4705, which I went for because of the ability to have the internal trace antenna. This lets you use the cart without any external antenna which is a nice fit for the game boy cart! But I may experiment with some of the other si chips in the future.
Ah, gotcha, I missed that. Page 2 of this has a comparison table; if you did give up and do your own antenna the 4735 could be a more direct alternative than the 32.
https://www.skyworksinc.com/-/media/Skyworks/SL/documents/public/application-notes/AN332.pdf