Cramming A DS Inside A Gameboy

November 16, 2021 by 4 Comments

Many holiday recipes and console hacks share a common theme: cramming a thing inside another thing. Whether it’s turducken or a Nintendo DS inside a Gameboy, the result is always unexpected. The chassis for this mod is a humble Gameboy color with a Gameboy SP screen tackled on the top to serve as the secondary display. Unfortunately, this mod lost touch screen functionality, limiting some of the games you can play.

[TheRetroFuture] received the custom handheld from [GameboyCustom], which was somewhat damaged in shipping. The original screw mounts had to be removed and the case glued back together to fit the DS motherboard. So for [TheRetroFuture] to get inside to start troubleshooting involved a razor blade and patience. Testing various points and swapping components got [TheRetroFuture] closer to the root problems. The fix ended up being a few wires that came loose during shipping. Finally, after reseating a display connection and some careful soldering, it booted and started playing games.

Overall, it’s pretty impressive to see Mario Kart DS running on both screens on the tiny handheld. But you might be asking, why? Why shove one handheld inside another handheld? Sometimes it’s to gain new functionality like this Raspberry Pi inside a PSP body. Sometimes, it’s just because we can. Video after the break.

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A LiPo Cell Makes A 4AA Pack For A GameBoy

July 31, 2021 by 14 Comments

Electronic toys of yesteryear were fantastic objects of desire, but came with the fatal flaw of requiring batteries. Batteries that cost more than the average youngster’s pocket money and for which the pestered parent were usually unwilling to fork out every couple of days to support an incessant playing habit. It’s something [Sen] has addressed for the Nintendo Game Boy, and rather than cutting the device up and soldering wires, the result is a unit that neatly slots into the existing 4AA battery enclosure.

The Nintendo rechargable Game Boy pack.
Much more convenient than Nintendo’s own effort!

Electrically it’s a simple case of wiring up an Adafruit module and a pouch cell, but that’s not the essence of the job in this case. Instead a huge quantity of work and iteration has gone into CAD design to the perfect-fitting pack. It’s sure to be a boon for today’s Game Boy player, but much more than that it should be of interest to owners of far more devices that take four AA cells. Most of us probably keep a few packs of AAs for just those moments, perhaps meanwhile something like this could be a handy thing to have instead.

More traditional conversions resort to extreme measures, as with this Game Boy Color.

Nintendo DS Transformed Into Gameboy Macro

June 8, 2021 by 7 Comments

Nintendo’s Game Boy line were the world’s most popular handheld gaming systems, but did have their drawbacks. Most notably, the Game Boy didn’t receive a backlit color LCD until the Game Boy Advance SP launched in 2003. Of course, you can always build your own Game Boy that rectifies this and other shortcomings, and that’s what [JoshuaGuess] did with this Gameboy Macro build.

The build ends up like a bigger version of the Game Boy Micro, the final release in the Game Boy line.

The build is based around a Nintendo DS Lite, one of Nintendo’s later handhelds featuring dual screens. In this build, the top screen is removed and discarded entirely. The motherboard is then hacked with a resistor on some test points to allow it to still boot with the top missing. The shell of the bottom half is then cleverly modified with epoxy clay and paint in order to hide the original hinge and give a clean finished aesthetic.

The final result is essentially a larger version of the Game Boy Micro, the final handheld in the Game Boy line. It also has the benefit of a bigger, brighter screen compared to virtually any Game Boy ever made. The only thing to note is that the DS hardware can only play Game Boy Advance games, not the earlier 8-bit titles.

It’s a fun build, and one that goes to show you don’t have to throw a Raspberry Pi in everything to have a good time. That can be fun too, though. If you end up building the Game Boy Nano or Game Boy Giga, please let us know. Be sure to include measurements to indicate how it’s scaled in SI units relative to the Game Boy Micro itself.

RetroPlug Syncs Gameboy Emulators With Your DAW For Chiptunes Overload

August 12, 2020 by 2 Comments

The Gameboy is one of the biggest platforms in the chiptune scene. While it’s possible to play a show with a single handheld, many artists choose to use two or even more to fatten their sound and rock the crowd. To ease the workflow of creating songs for such a setup, [tommitytom] created Retroplug and you can see him walk through the features in the demo video after the break.

Retroplug is a VST wrapper for the Sameboy Gameboy emulator. This makes it possible to run multiple emulated Gameboy instances within digital audio software like Ableton or Fruityloops. Rather than having to juggle multiple 30-year old Gameboys and the associated batteries and link cables, instead, it can all be done within a hosted VST window.

Presently, the software works only with 64-bit Windows and VST2, however source is available for those eager to peek under the hood. It fully implements MIDI support for mGB, and works well with LSDJ and Arduinoboy setups. *.sav files are created for each emulated instance too, so when you’re done composing, you can throw your songs onto real hardware when you go out and perform!

We see no shortage of fresh projects, from Genesis chiptune players to MIDI control for Gameboys.  As its adherents always say, chiptune will never die. We’d love to see a similar project done with a C64 emulator, NES, or even the Genesis. If you happen to put it goether, drop us a line!

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The Multiyear Hunt For A Gameboy Game’s Bug

January 31, 2020 by 7 Comments

[Enddrift] had a real problem trying to run a classic game, Hello Kitty Collection: Miracle Fashion Maker, into a GBA (Gameboy Advance) emulator. During startup, the game would hit an endless loop waiting for a read from a non-existent memory location and thus wouldn’t start under the emulator. The problem is, the game works on real hardware even though that memory doesn’t exist there, either.

To further complicate things, a similar bug exists when loading a saved game under Sonic Pinball Party. Then a hack for Pokemon Emerald surfaced that helped break the case. The story is pretty interesting.

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The Strangest Gameboy Emulator We’ve Seen Yet

March 6, 2019 by 16 Comments

In the secret Hackaday bunker, we have some emacs users, some vi users, and some people who don’t really care. However, even the staunchest of our emacs supporters had to do a double take at [Vreeze’s] project that creates a GameBoy emulator using the venerable text editor. You can see [Alexei Nunez’s] reaction to the emulator in the video below.

The Eboy uses unicode characters to output the graphics. You can use emacs commands to load ROM images and use your keyboard to control the game.

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An Englishman And 48 Gameboys Walk Into A Bar…

November 29, 2018 by 23 Comments

The original Nintendo Gameboy is perhaps one of the most revered platforms for the music known as chiptune. Primarily, artists will use the console with software like LSDJ or Nanoloop to produce their compositions. Some artists will even use two consoles when performing live. However, that’s all fairly quaint as far as [LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER] is concerned.

Back in 2016, a rig was constructed with three Gameboys. With each console having 3 oscillators and a noise channel, this gave plenty of scope. There was even a facility to detune the oscillators for a fatter sound.

Yet there remains a universal human philosophy – more is always better. In this vein, the plan is to create a monster machine consisting of 48 Gameboy consoles. This offers a somewhat maddening 144 oscillators and 48 noise channels to play with. The plan is to produce a massive synthesizer capable of producing incredibly thick, dense tones with up to six note polyphony.

The hardware side of things is at once simple and ingenious. Buttons on the consoles are connected together for remote control using ribbon cables and transistors. System clocks for the consoles are provided by a LTC1799 oscillator chip, which allows the clock to be modulated for audio effects. Initial tests with up to six Gameboys running from a single clock source have been remarkably successful.

Any mad scientist could see the genius involved in this project, and we can’t wait to see the full rig in operation. If you’re just getting started with Gameboy music, check out this primer on modding your Gameboy for hi-fi sound. Video after the break.

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