home made gameboy

this was a project that i made a while back and it didn't work, but i recently went back to it and fixed it. its like my modular gameboy that i made only its entirely hand made from scratch with each pin of the cpu hand wired to the buffer chip and cartridge slot etc.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• home
• made
• gameboy
• custom
• modular
• LSDJ
• chip
• tune

[yoshie257]

Hey, you seem pretty smart. I need some help. I want to make one of these bad boys load games from an sd card, or make a cartridge that reads the sdcard. any help? thanks.

[RustyNex]

@yoshie257 hey there, thats not a little task, the SD card cannot be read from by the gameboy in real time as its too slow, so the rom has to be loaded into flash first, so you need a flash chip, SD holder and a controller chip in between that can hold the gameboy in reset while it copies over the rom from the SD. its not impossible, but after adding an SRAM and battery backup and a 5 to 3.3 voltage controller etc you will get tight for space in a gameboy cart. and then there is the programming

[scattrr]

i would love to watch all of these videos if it wasn't for the high pitched mosquito tone in all of your videos : /

[afatsweatyman]

OH GOD THAT SCREECHING NOISE MAKE IT STOP FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!!!!!!

[iToasterman]

@RustyNex itoasterman at gmail dot com, lets chat there.

[RustyNex]

@iToasterman my GF has skype, but if you want to talk about this you can email me: ralph (dot) nex (at) gmail (dot) com, the arduino doesn't have enough pins to connect to the gameboy on its own, and the gameboy doesn't have memory to store the rom, it would have to be on the cart, also the arduino doesn't have enough memory to act like a buffer, it would need an external buffer chip. but it could be done with a more powerful chip, but not an arduino

[iToasterman]

@RustyNex do you have skype? the idea is the arduino runs bare code to make a menu read from the card and write to the gba like a cart. It moves the rom into the gba's memory then handles reading and writing between the two. Its not too slow. Everything is buffered by the avr / arduino.

[RustyNex]

@iToasterman can you give an example? because i know about electronics and i know for a fact that you cannot make a gameboy cart using just an SD card and an arduino, you need at the bare minimum a flash chip to write the rom to,

[Gameboygenius]

@iToasterman I've thought a lot about these things, it wouldn't be impossible for sure. But you would need custom logic (FPGA/CPLD) to let the microcontroller access the onboard memory without interference from the GB (i.e. not a shared bus.) And you would need to design the whole thing, hardware and software. It's easy to tell people to try it when you don't have to do the work. Give me an Apple type budget and I will have this done in two months.

[iToasterman]

@RustyNex many people have done it. Just give it a damn try. stop saying no no no tooo slow. and try it. Worst that can happen is it wont work. even then you can still use the arduino to load games from a pc to the gameboy.

[RustyNex]

@iToasterman have you done this before? or have seen it done? because it cant, like i said the SD card is too slow, the arduino may be fast enough to keep up with the gameboy, but only just, because the gameboy runs in parallel so the arduino has to work very hard to keep up with that, but the arduino would have to work as a buffer to the SD card, it would have to take all the rom data, as replying to the rom and reading back wouldn't be fast enough

[iToasterman]

@RustyNex its not holding the rom. why dont you understand?! >:C The arduino reads the file and sends it bit by bit to the gameboy. Its only a layer between reading and writing to the sd card at high speed. Try it. everyone said iPad would fail without waiting, now look