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thoughts and links for game boy cartridge stuff

davedarkodavedarko wrote 09/02/2014 at 09:42 • 2 min read • Like

Seems like every month I stumble over an idea and can't get rid of it. This time of year I always get nostalgic and thought about using the fubarino as an cartridge reader and programmer for simple eeprom cartridges. I'm already developing a little board to start with the interface. I wonder if the fubarino could also act as an cartridge itself. Nice stuff to get started. I'm also interested in those memory bank controllers and how they work. 

I had to make a part for the edge connector, great exercise! Although I'm not yet happy with it, because the pads aren't long enough. Wiring was a mesmerizing nightmare :D 

And here is a list that comes in handy to resource games I could clone on this simple device. I have no idea what I am doing, but that is always the most interesting part.

http://www.devrs.com/gb/files/gbmbcsiz.txt


Funny thing about the price, it would not matter if I order 3 eeproms and 3 oshpark boards vs. 10 eeproms and 10 dirtypcbs. Kind of strange, but there are more then 10 games out there with 32kb so worst case scenario would be having 10 games. But I also want to program stuff myself and hope to get some GPIOs working - get that wifi dongle http://hackaday.io/project/2879-ESP8266-WiFi-Module-Library to work :D - in theory you could get a controller pull your twitter feed, store it in ram and have a program read it out. Seems like a good amount of work and a long life project.

Another cool cartridge concept is to have an arduino library for it, and the gameboy would fetch data to display and safe the button states so the arduino knows what button is pressed. This way you could use it as a remote.

Maybe it is possible to come up with an mbc-1 clone to adress more memory.

Some general informations: 

http://www.reinerziegler.de/
http://meatfighter.com/gameboy/TheNintendoGameboy.pdf

Great help for opening the cartridges:
[german, but the pics give it away]
http://www.retro-universum.de/howtos-und-anleitungen/offnen-von-alten-game-boy-spielen/

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davedarko wrote 02/11/2015 at 13:03 point

I never checked if the eagle footprint of a 27c256 would be switchable with a 28C256 footprint. It makes totally sense that the write pin would be on another place... but naah, I didn't check. So I guess I have to clone the part and edit the pins to get the right AT28c256 footprint. And the test board I made was not mirrored, so I can't use it either. Muah.

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davedarko wrote 02/10/2015 at 13:16 point

New Idea, MP3/8Bit player/cassette program. Listen to your favorite game boy tunes by using your game boy. 

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davedarko wrote 10/05/2014 at 10:22 point
graph plotting device

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