parski
Offline
Stockholm

Hey!

I have a Game Boy Color that's been on the operation table for a while due to a front light mod that I just never felt like completing due to certain circumstances.

Anyway. I just purchased an Arduino UNO since I have been having a lot of fun with an Altera NIOS II board at my university and I thought that I might be able to do something fun with the Game Boy Color and the Arduino. I'm a huge fan of retro games and there's almost nothing better sounding than an NES in my opinion. I've been listening to Kohina for some time and I thought it would be a fun project to look into chip music. Here's sort of what I want to do:

1) Via my Arduino get access to the sound chip in my Game Boy Color without having to turn the Game Boy on or anything. I pretty much want to isolate the sound chip. Maybe even put it on a bread board?

2) Be able to compose something on my computer and get it to run on the Arduino that outputs the signals to the Game Boy chip which then outputs that to a 3.5 mm audio cord that I can connect to my computer or whatever I want to output the sound to.

I realize this might be a lot more complicated than it has to be with all the LSDJ carts and stuff available that does all this for me, but it's not the goal that I'm necessarily looking forward to, it's the problem solving and learning process that I find interesting. I'm not much of a composer, but I have done my share of assembly programming in University.

Has anyone done anything like this before? The reason I'm posting this here is that I want to hear some honest feedback and constructive criticism before I get started. Maybe a link or two to help me begin.

Thanks!

nordloef
Offline
sweden

Check out trash80's arduinoboy and mGB. http://code.google.com/p/arduinoboy/

Timbob
Offline

As far as I know, the gameboy doesn't have a seperate sound chip. Just one CPU that does all the work which is based on the Z80 processor.

You can find some projects on the interwebs that connect an arduino with a Z80. But so far i can see, can't find one that uses an arduino to get sound directly out of a gameboy CPU...

parski
Offline
Stockholm
Timbob wrote:

As far as I know, the gameboy doesn't have a seperate sound chip. Just one CPU that does all the work which is based on the Z80 processor.

You can find some projects on the interwebs that connect an arduino with a Z80. But so far i can see, can't find one that uses an arduino to get sound directly out of a gameboy CPU...

Oh. Well this changes everything. I guess I'll do some sort of ArduinoBoy like the one mentioned above. However, I would not like to use MIDI since I don't have a keyboard or anything. I would just like to use my computer. Perhaps I can use the already present 3.5 mm headphone jack on the Game Boy Color?

Any idea of how difficult this kind of project is for an Arduino novice? Like I said, I've only dealt with Altera boards before.

Timbob
Offline
parski wrote:
Timbob wrote:

As far as I know, the gameboy doesn't have a seperate sound chip. Just one CPU that does all the work which is based on the Z80 processor.

You can find some projects on the interwebs that connect an arduino with a Z80. But so far i can see, can't find one that uses an arduino to get sound directly out of a gameboy CPU...

Oh. Well this changes everything. I guess I'll do some sort of ArduinoBoy like the one mentioned above. However, I would not like to use MIDI since I don't have a keyboard or anything. I would just like to use my computer. Perhaps I can use the already present 3.5 mm headphone jack on the Game Boy Color?

Any idea of how difficult this kind of project is for an Arduino novice? Like I said, I've only dealt with Altera boards before.

If you can follow instructions and can solder ok, then an arduinoboy shouldn't be a problem to make smile
It is kind of focused on midi, but for a few bucks you can get a cheap USB > Midi converter. that way you can still use your computer and something like ableton or fruityloops or whatever program you want.

You can use the headphone jack as a stereo output for the sound.

parski
Offline
Stockholm
Timbob wrote:

If you can follow instructions and can solder ok, then an arduinoboy shouldn't be a problem to make smile
It is kind of focused on midi, but for a few bucks you can get a cheap USB > Midi converter. that way you can still use your computer and something like ableton or fruityloops or whatever program you want.

You can use the headphone jack as a stereo output for the sound.

I'm good with following instructions and I'm descent at soldering. Getting this beast running with ReNoise would be fantastic! Thank you for the insight.

Trash80
Offline
Los Angeles

The Arduinoboy source code has a boolean for setting it to "usbmode" ... usb mode is the same as midi mode, except the baud rate is set to 38400 as oppose to 31250. you can then use any program or whatever on the computer to communicate with the gameboy via usb. (max,processing,etc,etc)