Once in a while we get to glimpse how people build on each other’s work in unexpected and interesting ways. So it is with the GateBoy project, a gate-level emulator built from die shots of the original Game Boy processor. The thing is, [Austin Appleby] didn’t have to start by decapping and taking photos of the chip. He didn’t even have to make his own schematics by reverse engineering those structures. Someone else had already done that and made it available for others to use. A couple of years back, [Furrtek] started manually tracing out the DMG chip and posted schematics to the DMG-CPU-Inside repo, kindly licensing it as CC-BY-SA 4.0 to let people know how they can use the info.

But playing Game Boy games isn’t actually the end game of [Austin’s] meticulous gate-level recreation. He’s using it to build “a set of programming tools that can bridge between the C/C++ universe used by software and the Verilog/VHDL universe used by hardware.” A new tool has been born, not for gaming, but for converting a meta language that assigns four-letter codes to gate structures (somewhat reminiscent of DNA sequences) and will eventually convert them to your choice of C++ or a Hardware Description Language for use with FPGAs.

The open source community is playing four-dimensional football. Each project moves the ball downfield, but some of them add an additional goal in an alternate hardware universe — advancing the aims of both (like finding and fixing some errors in [Furrtek’s] original schematics).

Of course the real challenge is getting the word out that these projects exist and can be useful for something you’re working on. For instance, [Neumi’s] depth sounding rowboat allows an individual to make detailed depth maps of lakes, rivers, and the like. It was in the comments that the OpenSeaMap project was brought up — a site working to create crowd sourced waterway charts. It’s the perfect place for [Neumi] to get inspiration, and help move that ball toward a set of goals.

How do we get the word out so more of these connections happen? We’ll do our part here at Hackaday. But it’s the well-document and thoughtfully-licensed projects that set the up playing field in the first place.