Matthew CarlsonSo the screen I selected from Alibaba has a 18 pin 0.8mm pitch FFC connector, which after a few days of searching and calling a few connector manufactures, is almost impossible to source in quantities under about 3000. It includes a resistive touch screen but upon examination, it looks like there is a sizable air gap between the plastic viewport and the actual screen so I don't know if the screen will be able to be used. I'll explore that in the future though. Perhaps with a little creative dremeling, it's possible. The goal is to have to do as few modifications as possible on the case itself.
TFT Screen Woes
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A Raspberry Pi Compute module based emulator inside of a GameBoy advanced
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Just some hints. The screen you selected is supposed to be soldered directly onto PCB, instead of using a FFC connector. Resistive touch screen can be removed, or it's actually optional. I mean, you may order screen that without the touch screens.
Also, I think that it's impossible to use such a screen without mod the case, since the screen on sale use 4:3 aspect ratio while the original GBA screen use 3:2 aspect ratio. Maybe you can try to use original GBA screen (that 240*160 non-backlit tft screen)? To my knowledge, the original screen use a RGB TTL interface, which can be supported by RPi 0/1B+/2B/3, but I'm not sure about the compute module.
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That's a good tip. That's eventually what I did. I made a little board I sent off to OSHPark's 0.8mm service that has the footprint. Right now it just turns right back into 1.0mm pitch connector since I didn't want to connect it directly to the screen but now I'm wondering if perhaps that's the best thing I can do.
I'll look into the original GBA screen but I think the challenge there would be sourcing them for cheaper than the 3.2" LCD (11$). My goal is to avoid destroying any original GBA's and providing a guide for people to build there own.
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Actually, I'm also looking into mod GBA with a Raspberry Pi. Almost all the mod even the commercial GBA clone I see use 320*240 screen, which means it cannot be pixel perfect. Stretching algorithm would either make it blurred or somekind unbalanced. So I'm trying to find a 480*320 screen with the right size. 480*320 is 4 times of the original resolution, so it could be pixel perfect.
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Oh that's a good point. Something I'm considering is the bezel is quite large and I don't want to modify it so I'm losing some pixels of the screen.
Most screens are SPI which has a reasonable refresh rate until you get larger screen sizes. I've been looking for screens that have a parallel interface but they're less common.
Thank you for the advice by the way! I forgot to mention that in my previous comment.
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