Game Boy Cartridge plus Programmer

this design should finally allow me to put the PCB between the connector and cpu on a Game Boy pocket mainboard and solder it up with magnetic coil wire instead of the heavily isolated cables. I've ordered 12 2oz 0.8mm boards on OSHpark.

@Frank Buss just linked me this http://www.coolmath-games.com/0-bloxorz http://www.frank-buss.de/vectrex/index.html a neat little puzzle game. Should I ever come to writing a Game Boy game, then this would definitely be a candidate! Right after Game of Life of course.

#WIFI Game Boy Cartridge - this is my entry for the hackaday.io prize. It is all based on the efforts I've made in this project. But everything I've done here was also in preparation for having an Internet connected Game Boy. Once the IoT segment of the prize is opened, I will submit the project to that as well.

There is currently a funding round, where every like get's you a dollar - you probably have already heard about that ;) It would be great if you could head over there and add a like to the project - feel free to remove the like once the funding is over and maybe give it back once everything works :D that would be pretty motivational.

Anyway, I wish all the contestants the best of luck!

finally! So I took the cartridge code and just placed it as an array on the at90usb1287. Teh, after writing, then reading to the eeprom I got it to work :)

So the Nintendo Logo is on the cartridge - I can see that because it scrolls down, but after the "bading" it stays black. A quick check comparing the original to the dump shows this:

http://www.chrisantonellis.com/gameboy/gbtdg/

with the help of this little website I was able to create a little Game Boy ROM, that displays the hackaday jolly wrencher. You can find the code and rom in the file sections. I tried to upload the files and write it to the cartridge, but had no success so far. Not sure what's going on, but I'm too tired to try to find out.

You only need to add the following code to the generated C file, depending on that your file was called something like HaDlogo.bmp - otherwise you have to rename stuff.

#include <gb/gb.h>
#include <stdio.h>

void main()
{
  set_bkg_data(0,255,HaDlogo_tile_data);
  VBK_REG = 1;
  set_bkg_tiles(0,0,20,18,HaDlogo_map_data);
  SHOW_BKG;
  DISPLAY_ON;
}

I will not persue this :D but having a lot of game boy pockets coming in, that have a broken display... I wonder if there could be a feasible replacement like an fpga / arm controlled display that grabs the input like the fpga vga adapter does. There was a blog post once and it was also integrated into the huge ben heck game boy. Could be interesting to try for someone whos into fpgas and gameboys.

The bivert module I bought from handheldlengend.com has some design flaws, the unused inverters aren't grounded and there is no decoupling capacitor. So for future mods I will use one of these boards that feature a dual inverter named SN74LVC2G04. It's also smaller and potentially easier to install in the Game Boy Pocket.

UPDATE: there is a smaller version for Game Boy Pockets to buy already at http://store.kitsch-bent.com/product/gb-pocket-lcd-inverter

UPDATE2: a redesign with an dual XOR chip might be interesting, to revert the bivert. Sounds like a dance move :D

I've "biverted" and added a backlight to the not so cheap Game Boy Pocket I own not so long :) This means testing homebrew cartridges with style! This is the yellow backlight of www.handheldlegends.com - the hex inverter module was quite the hassle with a Game Boy pocket. I should have designed it myself, but also wanted to support the website.

I think it might be possible to have the ESP8266 inside a cartridge, with an Atmega16A faking to be a dual port (SPI + parallel BUS) SRAM and the ESP8266 faking to be a memory bank controller. This way I could grab data from the web, put it into "RAM" and read it out with the game boy. This way I could also get rid of the dongle ESP idea. Some protocols would have to be written and thought out. Feeling very yoda-ish today. Gotta eat sth.

Research update

• https://github.com/pfalcon/esp-open-sdk