Nintendo Game Boy Hacks

243 Articles

nintendo gameboy hacks

Back From Belize Extra

October 6, 2007 by 12 Comments


Yesterday, I was standing on a tropical island off the coast of Belize. Vacation rocked with lots of SCUBA diving, spearfishing and snorkeling. I’m back home, shaking off the jet lag and clearing up my inbox. Thanks to [fabienne] for filling in and letting me unplug for a while!

[Darkrom] has set a new standard for Hack-A-Day readers… I haven’t seen it in person, but that looks like a legit Hack-A-Day tattoo.

[null] sent in a new use for a frequency generator, a spare car amp, a sub-woofer and a plastic coffee can – brass cartridge polishing.

[LoopyMind] sent in this Game Boy Advanced Movie Player IDE hack. It’s pretty much a direct CF to laptop drive cable with an external battery supply.

[Dingolishious] sent in a POE UPS/remote power control solution. Could be handy if you’re using many POE devices, or if you’re having power issues. He added an inexpensive remote power monitor/switch solution behind his UPS. It senses power outages and kicks out an email – and allows remote power cycling of his POE devices. Of course, if you’ve got a linux box behind the UPS, it can monitor the output from the UPS and send notifications.

[William] added a preamp stage to his iKEY usb recorder. looks like an interesting toy – it’ll record audio directly to a USB flash key. The pre-amp allows him to record in more challenging environments.

[Andrew] noted a simple mod to increase the deadly fire power of the ubiquitous airsoft pellet gun. It’s just a matter of reducing some extra space in the spring compression area.

Last but not least, [VIPER] modded his projector to use a 12v halogen headlight bulb. Not a bad idea – at one point I was pondering a 550 watt source four halogen as a possible replacement.

DIY DS Lite RumblePak

July 22, 2007 by 6 Comments


This one’s been making the blog rounds, but it really fits us. Nintendo makes one, but this instructables tells you how to make your own for a DS lite. It uses a PIC 12F675 to read the input line and activate a vibration motor from an old nokia cell phone.

Oh, speaking of instructables, I forgot to mention that they finally picked a winner for their laser etching machine. Of course, if you lack the budget, you can make your own for $60.

Happy Thxgiving – DSmidiwifi

November 23, 2006 by 13 Comments

[Tom] pointed out this nintendo DS midi wifi hack demo. [0xtob] and [therain] put on a demo of using a ds as a midi device. Check out the video. The two most interesting applications demo’ed: [to me] The kaos pad app and using the DS as a midi playback device. [I wonder how long until we see a DS orchestra. Seems like the DS still has plenty of potential for development. [via musicthing]

Nintendo DS MIDI Port

August 2, 2006 by 22 Comments

nintendo DS midi

[therain] has added a MIDI port to his Nintendo DS. It’s just a two wire connection so it’s pretty easy if you’ve got an extra cart laying around. As a demo, he wrote a program that uses the touchpad to act as two Control Change devices. One is the X value and the other the Y so it behaves similar to the Korg Kaoss pad. He’s working on a sequencer as well.

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Game Boy Advance MIDI Interface

May 22, 2006 by 20 Comments

gba midi

[Avelino Herrera Morales] wrote in to tell us about his Game Boy Advance MIDI project. It’s pretty neat since it only takes two resistors and a link cable to use. The link cable has a slotted connector so you can use a chunk of protoboard to connect to the pins. He has software the does all of the MIDI packet generation. As an example, he uses the GBA to control a Chameleon synthesizer.

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