Bringing The Game Boy Camera Into The 21st Century

July 8, 2021 by Jenny List 6 Comments

The Game Boy Camera is probably one of the most limited-specification digital cameras to have been mass-marketed, yet it occupies a special position in the hearts of many because despite being a toy with a paltry 128×128 monochrome sensor it was for many the first camera they owned. [Matt Grey] was among those people, and was always frustrated by the device’s inability to export pictures except to the Game Boy printer. So after having bodged together an interface a decade ago but not being happy with it, he returned to the project and made a wireless carrier for the camera that allows easy transfer through WiFi to his mobile phone.

Inside the slab-like 3D-printed enclosure lies a GBxCart RW Game Boy cartridge reader, whose USB port is wired to a Raspberry Pi Zero on which are a set of scripts to read the camera and make its photos available for download via a web browser. At last the camera is a stand-alone unit, allowing the easy snapping and retrieval of as many tiny black and white images as he likes. There’s a video showing the device in action, which we’ve placed for your enjoyment below the break.

This camera has appeared in so many projects on these pages over the years, but we’re guessing that the work on whose shoulders this one stands would be the moment its workings were reverse engineered.

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Pi Pico Game Boy Flash Cart Gets Slim RP2040 Upgrade

July 1, 2021 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

The story for this one starts a few months ago, when [John Green] released his PICO-GB project. His code allowed the Raspberry Pi Pico to stand in for a Game Boy cartridge, complete with a simple text menu that let the user select between ROMs that had been baked into the microcontroller’s firmware. The project was particularly notable for the fact that it was entirely a software solution; while a custom breakout cartridge made for a handy temporary solution, you could have permanently wired the Pico’s pins directly to the Game Boy’s cartridge connector if you wanted to.

PICO-GB running on the full-size Pi Pico

Then in early June, the RP2040 chip that powers the Pi Pico went up for sale in single unit quantities. That opened up the possibility of building the PICO-GB functionality into a cartridge small enough to actually fit inside the Game Boy. So [Martin “HDR” Refseth] got to work creating the slick cartridge PCB you’re seeing now.

The RP2040 is joined by a trio of Texas Instruments TXB0108 level shifters, and there’s a spot for adding a SPI flash chip. The RP2040 supports a maximum of 16 MB of external flash, but given the size of Game Boy games were generally measured in kilobytes, that shouldn’t pose much of a problem.

Looking ahead, the original PICO-GB documentation mentions enhancements like loading ROMs from SD card, as well as hardware additions like a real-time-clock for the more advanced games that supported it. We assume those concepts will become part of [Martin]’s PCB eventually, but these are still early days.

We’ve seen Game Boy cartridge emulation with a microcontroller in the past, but we’re exited to see how the unique capabilities of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s custom silicon can improve the state-of-the-art.

[Thanks to Itay for the tip.]

The Game Boy As You Have Never Seen It Before Is Newest From [Sprite_tm]

June 29, 2021 by Jenny List 16 Comments

Explain a Game Boy to a child in 2021 and they’ll have little idea of how much impact that chunky grey brick had back in the day. Search for a YouTube video to demonstrate, and you might find the one we’ve put below the break. It starts with the classic Tetris on the Game Boy, then moves on to Super Mario World before treating us to Sonic the Hedgehog, and finally Doom. All seminal games of the Game Boy’s heyday, with one small problem. The last three were never Game Boy titles, and certainly wouldn’t have run on the device’s limited hardware. Most of you will by now not be surprised to find that the narrator is none other than [Sprite_tm], and his Game Boy has one of the nicest Raspberry Pi conversions we’ve ever seen.

Given his previous work we expected the cartridges to have an ESP32 on board that somehow mapped into Game Boy display memory, but in fact he’s swapped the original Nintendo motherboard with a replacement carrying an ICE40 FPGA on one side to handle the Nintendo hardware and a Pi Zero on the other to do the heavy lifting. Insert a Game Boy cartridge and it emulates the original to the point you’d never suspect it wasn’t the real thing, but insert one of the non Game Boy cartridges and it passes an identifier to the Pi which launches a script to run the appropriate Pi code. So the Mario and Sonic games are running in Pi-based emulators, and Doom is running natively on the Pi. It gives the appearance of a seamless gaming experience, wherein lies its charm.

This project certainly has the quality we’ve come to expect from Sprite, and a quick flick through these pages will show plenty of previous examples. One of the most recent was a miniature working DEC VT100 terminal containing an emulated PDP minicomputer.

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Simulating The Game Boy Printer’s Actual Paper Output

June 25, 2021 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Sometimes, we appreciate electronic devices not for their outright performance and crystal clear output, but precisely because they kind of suck in a unique and charming way. The Game Boy Camera, and its companion the Game Boy Printer, are much loved for precisely this reason. [Raphael BOICHOT] decided that he wanted to simulate the analog reality of the latter printer’s output in code, and set about the hefty coding task.

The result is the Game Boy Printer Paper Simulation, and it does a great job of reproducing the grainy, somewhat noisy output of the original thermal printer. The simulation was coded with the assistance of multiple high-resolution scans of the original printer’s output, which allowed [Raphael] to create a mathematical model of how the original digital pixelized image came out when hot thermal print head was put to paper.

What started with a single dot became a fully-fledged simulation package that can be run in MATLAB and Octave. It allows the end user to generate legitimate-looking images of Game Boy Printer output without actually having to own the printer and a roll of thermal paper.

We’ve seen Nintendo’s much-beloved printer before, such as this hack that turns it into an 8-bit photo gun. If you’re meddling with thermal printers yourself, be sure to let us know!

Steady Hand Brings GBA Cart Back From The Grave

June 22, 2021 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

The flash chips used in Game Boy Advance (GBA) cartridges were intended to be more reliable and less bulky than the battery-backed SRAM used to save player progress on earlier systems. But with some GBA titles now hitting their 20th anniversary, it’s not unheard of for older carts to have trouble loading saves or creating new ones. Perhaps that’s why the previous owner tried to reflow the flash chip on their copy of Golden Sun, but as [Taylor Burley] found after he opened up the case, they only ended up making the situation worse.

A previous repair attempt left the PCB badly damaged.

When presented with so many damaged traces on the PCB, the most reasonable course of action would have been to get a donor cartridge and swap the save chips. But a quick check on eBay shows that copies of Golden Sun don’t exactly come cheap. So [Taylor] decided to flex his soldering muscles and repair each trace with a carefully bent piece of 30 gauge wire. If you need your daily dose of Zen, just watch his methodical process in the video below.

While it certainly doesn’t detract from [Taylor]’s impressive soldering work, it should be said that the design of the cartridge PCB did help out a bit, as many of the damaged traces had nearby vias which gave him convenient spots to attach his new wires. It also appears the PCB was designed to accept flash chips of varying physical dimensions, which provided some extra breathing room for the repairs.

Seeing his handiwork, it probably won’t surprise you to find that this isn’t the first time [Taylor] has performed some life-saving microsurgery. Just last year he was able to repair the PCB of an XBox controller than had literally been snapped in half.

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Nintendo DS Transformed Into Gameboy Macro

June 8, 2021 by Lewin Day 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.

Original Game Boy Powered Up With GBA Motherboard

May 11, 2021 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

The Game Boy DMG-01 is about as iconic as a piece of consumer electronics can get, but let’s be honest, it hasn’t exactly aged well. While there’s certainly a number of games for the system that are still as entertaining in 2021 as they were in the 80s and 90s, the hardware itself is another story entirely. Having to squint at the unlit display, with its somewhat nauseating green tint, certainly takes away from the experience of hunting down Pokémon.

Which is precisely why [The Poor Student Hobbyist] decided to take an original Game Boy and replace its internals with more modern hardware in the form of a Game Boy Advance (GBA) SP motherboard and aftermarket IPS LCD panel. The backwards compatibility mode of the GBA allows him to play those classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color games from their original cartridges, while the IPS display brings them to life in a way never before possible.

Relocating the cartridge connector took several attempts.

Now on the surface, this might seem like a relatively simple project. After all, the GBA SP was much smaller than its predecessors, so there should be plenty of room inside the relatively cavernous DMG-01 case for the transplanted hardware. But [The Poor Student Hobbyist] made things quite a bit harder on himself by deciding early on that there would be no external signs that the Game Boy had been modified; beyond the wildly improved screen, anyway.

That meant deleting the GBA’s shoulder buttons, though since the goal was always to play older games that predated their addition to the system, that wasn’t really a problem. The GBA’s larger and wider screen is still intact, albeit hidden behind the Game Boy’s original bezel. It turns out the image isn’t exactly centered on the physical display, so [The Poor Student Hobbyist] came up with a 3D printed adapter to mount it with a slight offset. The adapter also allows the small tactile switch that controls the screen brightness to be mounted where the “Contrast” wheel used to go.

An incredible amount of thought and effort went into making the final result look as close to stock as possible, and luckily for us, [The Poor Student Hobbyist] did a phenomenal job of documenting it for others who might want to make similar modifications. Even if you’re not in the market for a rejuvenated Game Boy, it’s worth browsing through the build log to marvel at the passion that went into this project.

Some would argue [The Poor Student Hobbyist] should have just put a Raspberry Pi into a Game Boy case and be done with it, but where’s the fun in that? Sure it might have been a somewhat better Bitcoin miner, but there’s something to be said for playing classic games on real hardware.