Clock Mod Brings Super Game Boy To Competitive Arena

April 14, 2019 by 14 Comments

For one time small window between 1994 and 1998, you could play Game Boy games in color with a Super Game Boy. This was a cartridge that plugged into a Super Nintendo, and using proprietary Lock-On™ technology, you could play Game Boy games on the big screen. Inside the Super Game Boy was the guts of a real Game Boy. This was, and still is, the best way to experience everything from Kirby’s Dream Land or the Pokemon of Kanto.

Unfortunately, the Super Game Boy doesn’t exactly replicate the Game Boy experience. The crystal in the Super Game Boy means that games and sound run between 2 and 4% faster. The Super Game Boy is out for competitive speed running, and if you’re using Little Sound DJ, you’ll be out of tune with the rest of the band. The Super Game Boy doesn’t have link cable support, either.

Now, [qwertymodo] over on Tindie has the solution to the faster Super Game Boy. It’s a clock mod, but it’s not just swapping a crystal. This is a board that solders to existing pads, and still allows you to access the speed up and slow down functions available from the Commander controller from Hori. It’s a slightly impressive bit of PCB art, and certainly something that deserves notice.

This mod fixes the 2-4% speedup of the Super Game Boy, but then there’s still one feature missing: the link cable. Well, hold on to your butts, because there’s a mod for this one too. The Super Game Boy Link Port is a small little breakout board that requires fly wires to the main chip in the Super Game Boy. The installation isn’t quite as clean as the crystal hack, but if you’re fixing the clock, you might as well add the link cable port while you’re in there.

[qwertymodo] has a comparison test of the Super Game Boy running Pokemon Red, and this thing is dead on. It runs at exactly the same speed as an original Game Boy, only in color, on a TV. You can check that out below.

Continue reading “Clock Mod Brings Super Game Boy To Competitive Arena” →

Game Boy Recreated In Verilog

March 23, 2019 by 8 Comments

With the wide availability of Raspberry Pi hardware and pre-baked Linux distros with emulators ready to go, making a retro handheld is easier than ever. Emulation isn’t the only way to go about playing old games however. [Wenting Zhang] decided to instead recreate the Nintendo Game Boy in Verilog, and has documented the effort.

The project runs on a Spartan 6 FPGA. [Wenting] first developed the hardware to use a DualShock controller for input, and output video to a regular LCD monitor. However, work is now underway to produce a handheld VerilogBoy. This will feature a 320×320 LCD screen, with pixels being quadrupled from the original Game Boy 160×144 resolution, with some pixels to spare. [Wenting] is also looking at porting the code to some Pano Logic units, which we’ve discussed before. The thin clients pack FPGA hardware and lots of IO ports that make them perfect for such a project.

Code is available on Github for the curious tinkerers out there. While there are easier ways to play old handheld games, the amount of learning value of such a project should not be underestimated. We’ve seen FPGAs used for other Nintendo hijinx, too – like this NES cart that packs some serious muscle. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Game Boy Recreated In Verilog” →

A Game Boy Supercomputer For AI Research

March 15, 2019 by 12 Comments

Reinforcement learning has been a hot-button area of research into artificial intelligence. This is a method where software agents make decisions and refine these over time based on analyzing resulting outcomes. [Kamil Rocki] had been exploring this field, but needed some more powerful tools. As it turned out, a cluster of emulated Game Boys running at a billion FPS was just the ticket.

The trick to efficient development of reinforcement learning systems is to be able to run things quickly. If it takes an AI one thousand attempts to clear level 1 of Super Mario Bros., you’d better hope you’re not running that in real time. [Kamil] started by coding a Game Boy emulator in C. By then implementing it in Verilog, [Kamil] was able to create a cluster of emulated Game Boys that enabled games to be run at breakneck speed, greatly speeding the training and development process.

[Kamil] goes into detail about how the work came to revolve around the Game Boy platform. After initial work with the Atari 2600, which is somewhat of a defacto standard in RL circles, [Kamil] began to explore further. It was desired to have an environment with a well-documented CPU,  a simple display to cut down on the preprocessing required, and a wide selection of games.

The goal of the project is to allow [Kamil] to explore the transfer of knowledge from one game to another in RL systems. The aim is to determine whether for an AI, skills at Metroid can help in Prince of Persia, for example. This is arguably true for human players, but it remains to be seen if this can be carried over for RL systems.

It’s rather advanced work, on both a hardware emulation level and in terms of AI research. Similar work has been done, training a computer to play Super Mario through monitoring score and world values. We can’t wait to see where this research leads in years to come.

Corn Starch Fixes A Game Boy Screen

March 4, 2019 by 10 Comments

Nintendo’s Game Boy was the handheld of the 1990s. Like many of their products, it was famous for its ability to stand up to punishment from angry children and military strikes alike. Its biggest weakness is perhaps its unbacklit LCD screen. Retrogamers and chiptuners alike find themselves modifying and replacing these regularly.

A common problem during these swaps is “Newton rings” – an issue where the polarizer comes into contact with the LCD glass, causing unsightly visual artifacts. Thankfully, there is a simple fix. It’s possible to keep the two separated with the application of microscopic particles, too small to see. [esotericsean] uses cornstarch, while [bogamanz] favors diatomaceous earth. For best results, a makeup brush can be used to apply a fine coating, and compressed air used to clean out the Game Boy and remove any excess.

It’s rare to fix a delicate screen problem with a household staple, but gratifying when it works. The results are hard to see on camera, but many report this fixing the frustrating issue. So, if you’re planning to backlight your Game Boy, keep this in your bag of tricks. It’ll allow you to get the best possible result, and may be useful on other old-school LCDs as well. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Corn Starch Fixes A Game Boy Screen” →

FPGA Brings Arduboy To The Game Boy Advance

February 21, 2019 by 8 Comments

Hackaday readers are perhaps familiar with the Arduboy, an open source handheld gaming system that aims to combine the ease of Arduino development with the seething nostalgia the Internet has towards the original Nintendo Game Boy. While not quite the same as getting one of your games published for a “real” system, the open source nature of the Arduboy platform allows an individual to develop a game playable on a commercially manufactured device.

While the Arduboy hardware itself is actually quite slick, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to bring its games to other pieces of hardware. Now thanks to the efforts of [uXe], the Game Boy Advance is well on its way to becoming Arduboy compatible, in a way bringing the whole project full circle. Assuming this gadget becomes a commercial device (it sounds like that’s still up in the air), Arduboy developers will be able to proudly play their creations on the final and objectively best entry into the Game Boy line.

Getting to this point has been something of an adventure, as documented in a thread from the Arduboy forums. Members of the community wondered what it would take to get Arduboy games running on a real Game Boy, but pretty quickly it was decided that the original beige brick model wasn’t quite up to the task. Eventually its far more capable successor the Game Boy Advance became the development target, and different approaches were considered for getting existing games running on the platform.

While there were some interesting ideas, such as using the GBA’s link port to “feed” the system games over SPI, in the end [uXe] decided to look into creating an FPGA cartridge that would actually run the Arduboy games. In this scenario, the GBA itself is basically just being used as an interface between the FPGA and the human player. In addition to these low-level hardware considerations, there was considerable discussion about the more practical aspects of bringing the games to the new hardware, such as how to best scale the Arduboy’s 128 x 64 output to the GBA’s 240 × 160 screen.

As demonstrated in the videos after the break, [uXe] now as all the elements for playing Arduboy games on the GBA in place, including the ability to disable full screen scaling by using the shoulder buttons. Now he just needs to shrink the hardware down to the point it will fit inside of a standard GBA cartridge. Beyond that, who knows? Perhaps the appeal of being able to run Arduboy games on a real Game Boy is enough to warrant turning this hack into a new commercial product.

Thanks to a hardware swap we’ve seen Arduboy games played on the Dreamcast VMU, and [uXe] himself previously grafted Arduboy-compatible hardware into an original Game Boy, but being able to play these games on an unmodified Game Boy Advance obviously has its own appeal. At the very least, it will be a bit more ergonomic than using a hacked classroom gadget.

Continue reading “FPGA Brings Arduboy To The Game Boy Advance” →

Use Your Game Boy As A Wireless Controller

January 2, 2019 by 11 Comments

Like many retro favourites, the Game Boy is in no way dead — development continues apace through its many fans.But what about the hardware side? This is a particularly interesting one: [Alex] wondered if a Game Boy could be readily used as a wireless controller. Set out to make it happen, the final product is a game cartridge that makes the classic handheld a wireless controller.

It’s achieved quite elegantly, with a custom cartridge used to turn the Game Boy into a controller while requiring no modification to the handheld. The cartridge contains a flash chip to store the ROM, along with an ATmega48PA microcontroller and an NRF24L01 to do the talking. Upon powerup, the Game Boy runs code from the ROM, and the microcontroller is in charge of reading button states and sending them to the NRF24L01 for transmission. The program stored on the ROM also allows configuration changes to be made from the Game Boy itself, such as choosing the appropriate wireless channel.

The cartridge transmitter can be used with a variety of receivers. [Andy] has developed a USB HID joystick emulator to allow the Game Boy to be used with PCs, as well as a receiver for the GameCube, too. Yes, that’s right — you can now play Super Smash Bros. with a weirder controller than all your friends. A Super Nintendo version is also in the works. Perhaps the coolest feature, however, is that the cart can use its radio link to communicate with another Game Boy running the same cartridge. [Andy] demonstrates this with a basic game of Pong being played between two Game Boy Advances.

Working on retro hardware can be great fun — things are well documented, parts are cheap, and there’ll be plenty of fans cheering you on, too. [Andy] has even made the hardware available for purchase on Tindie and his website if you’re not quite comfortable rolling your own.

The Game Boy platform remains ripe for hacking – you can even take screenshots with a logic analyzer these days. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Use Your Game Boy As A Wireless Controller” →

Game Boy Camera – Now In Color

December 22, 2018 by 15 Comments

The Game Boy Camera is a legendary piece of 90s gaming hardware, despite not being a game at all. It consisted of a low-resolution greyscale camera, fitted to a Game Boy cartridge, that you could use to photograph your friends, vandalise their pictures, then print them out on a thermal printer. It’s hardware that was fun because of its limitations, not despite them. However, [Matt] wondered if there was a way to use early photographic techniques to get color photos.

The technique is simple – get red, green, and blue filters, and take three photos – one using each filter. Then, combine the photos digitally to create the color image.  This necessitates an amusingly complex process to transfer the photos from Game Boy to PC, of course.

There are some limitations – due to the speed of the Game Boy Camera, it works best with static scenes, as it takes several seconds to shoot. Also, due to the low resolution, it’s best to choose subjects with broad swathes of color. Despite this, [Matt] managed to take some great images with a colorful yet vintage digital charm. There’s other ways to achieve this, of course – like bringing the power of neural networks to bear on your low-res Game Boy images. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Game Boy Camera – Now In Color” →