heh im about to move back to gp2x midi from pi because its not very portable... hopefully somone makes a gb laser case for the pi that supports shoulder pads someday
That sounds like fun, actually. I don't know enough about piggy to know what would need to be built, but when I have my laser up and running again I might have a play about with it.
I think you're probably gonna want to look up information about DOS and old PC standards more so than anything else.
In general, floppies will work well for pushing small amounts of data, but you're going to be extremely frustrated when it comes time to try to move bigger files. Remember that 1.4 megabyte is not very big. USB drives will not work on this, even if you do find a PCMCIA to USB card. I'd look for a PCMCIA CD drive that you can get DOS drivers for, or a ZIP drive. A ZIP drive will be hard to find, and when you go shopping for one do not just assume from the 25-pin connector that it's parallel port compatible. SCSI drives also use this same plug! As a last resort, you can run data through the serial port using the port expander.
This machine only has a 75mhz processor and maxes out at 32 megabytes of RAM, so I would only go as high as Windows 3.1 if you don't want this thing to be cripplingly slow. Also, even if you run DOS 4.0, you will only be able to reach a maximum disk size of 4GB, and each partition can only be 2GB in size. This is a hard limitation of FAT16 file formatting. For this reason I would really consider an IDE to Compact Flash adapter and just get a cheap 2 or 4GB CF card. No point in going for anything more fancy, especially as the drive controller in this is so slow you will get no gains from a modern SSD.
Lastly, it should be possible to image the CF card to be bootable on the Libretto so that you don't have to go through the hair-tearing "fun" of trying to install an OS on a machine so old.
(Note: I read about this on Hackaday, but their article didn't actually explain the project very well at all, calling this a flash cartridge, when in fact it is not really anything of the kind.)
So, a fellow who goes by the name Godzil has been working to reverse engineer the Bandai 200x chip. This is the chip responsible for allowing the Wonderswan to boot up, and was likely meant to prevent bootleggers from making pirate or unlicensed Wonderswan games. The fact that it has never been properly documented or reverse engineered is the primary reason why Wonderswan homebrew has so far been limited to the WonderWitch and thus a very, very small community in Japan.
He made himself a fairly simple looking passive breakout board, and began probing the pins until he learned how the chip's handshake worked, then coded up a replacement in VHDL and put it onto a CPLD. He's planning to release the VHDL with an open source license, though for the moment it's CC-BY-ND. He's also apparently planning to design a flash cart around this work which is currently called WonderMadeline, though he doesn't explain any details about this. Also, this is just my understanding from reading his broken English. You should definitely check it out if you like WonderSwan, it looks cool.
(For those looking for the "Take my money already!" approach, he appears to be selling some of the extra breakout boards he ordered for the project, although unless you have a logic analyzer and a bunch of other fancy tools you probably won't find it super useful. Yet.)
Start with a smaller ratio than even he suggests. I cannot stress this enough. Then if you're confident in the outcome, add a little more of the active ingredient next time. None of us can afford to melt a GB.
But yes, it will work on clear too.
Yeah, I always do this with weaker H2O2 just so that I feel I have more control. You can always wait for a longr period but you can't undo it if you wreck the plastic.
I've never bothered with the retrobrite pastes, I pretty much exclusively use the liquid bath. In the past I have used the cheap 3% hydrogen peroxide and sometimes I've even cut it with water to make sure I can fully submerge the pieces. I use more oxi-clean than suggested, and when I can't notice any more fizzing or bubbling I add more. I also frequently agitate to ensure maximum chemical availability. I've also just been using sunlight.
Here's an example of one I did several years ago, and the only photo I have on hand that's convenient.
I had the pieces in a glass jar, and used a pie plate as a kind of sun reflector, and just made sure I stirred it often and frequently added oxiclean when the fizzing stopped.
Cool plan, I was just wondering how you're going to address the humming issue most EL panels get?
If you read the post and watch the video, you will note that the Aquamarine colored panels are LED, and are merely color matched to the old EL style panels. They are not actually EL, I don't think...
Checked luggage should be fine. As for the ruling, my best guess is, if you can switch it on and show what it is, they won't care. Especially with a Gameboy. It's also my experience that unless you have brown skin, the TSA just doesn't care. Yes, it's horrifyingly racist and sickening, but that's how it is here.
i picked up a cheapo desiccation chamber for this very purpose if i get a chance soon, will post results! not worth it, at all, for the one-time mod, but perhaps for the modding shop people out there...
Whoah, nice! And here I was pondering just some slight negative pressure, maybe a medium-size tupperware and a Harbor Fright vacuum pump, but that sounds pretty legit.
It is possible to do it without totally knackering up the screen, but it requires specialized tools once it's cured, not just LOCA remover. I've seen Youtube videos of some Chinese madboys who designed a contraption that looks like a cross between a bandsaw and a cheese wire that is supposed to cut through the bond between the two pieces, and once apart they can be cleaned. They do this to salvage iPhone displays that have bubbles from the factory and would otherwise be thrown out.
IMO, not worth it.
I'm moving next week, and don't have a new workshop space planned out yet, but I'd like to try this, but with a vacuum chamber to make the bubble removal easier.
The voltage board still heats up, it gets less hot, but still hotter than normal. Also I got a pair of Duracell turbomax batteries that can show you how much charge is left. The after about 2 hours the gameboy powered down, yet the batteries themselves show 100% charge which is very strange. 2 hours of battery life is pretty abysmal, I expected some reduction but this is way too much and Im seeing people claiming they get about 7-8 hrs...
I guess I will buying various resistors and testing them out today or tomorrow and update with the results. Meanwhile if someone has any ideas Im all ears (or rather eyes).
I don't know if you're aware of this, but alkaline batteries in particular are not able to push that much current. The chemistry of the battery simply can't keep up if you make too much demand on them for current. This is especially true of AAA batteries. So you could well be starving the MGB of power without having fully drained the batteries.
Some of these longer-life alkaline batteries get their higher maH ratings from altering the chemistry or the construction of the layers inside the battery in such a way that you lose the ability to discharge rapidly in exchange for being able to hold more power overall. Trying a cheaper (I know, sounds crazy) brand of battery may actually make a difference in this application. Of if you're really desperate, you could try out some of those lipo batteries that have a high C rating.
Hi hi I just modded my GB Pocket with a backlight and the screen looks quite good. At first I did not use a separate resistor as the backlight should have internal one, however I noticed that while playing the lower left corner of the gameboy would heat up a bit too much for my taste. So I added a 39 ohm 0.25w resistor and it heats up less now. However I also noticed that my batteries only lasted about 2 hours (with the resistor added) of playing Pokemon Gold (mid contrast, max volume). It is true that I have charged those batteries about a week ago, but I have used them very slightly before, so they should have lasted more than 2 hours, way more - those are 1100mha batteries >_<.
Have any of you experienced heavily reduced battery life after installing a backlight? Would adding a stronger resistor (say 100ohm) fix the heat and battery life?
I dont really know the model of the backlight, it appears to be made by ASM and has 4 LED`s (for reference it is from gameboymodsuk).
Any suggestions are welcome.
Yeah, it does reduce battery life significantly. The best reults I ever had was actually with an LED backlight from an old iPod. It wasn't as blinding bright as the ones from Kitsch (only had one LED), but it consumed less power and I never had any heat issues.
That lower left corner you're talking about is where the voltage regulation circuitry is, and IMO, backlight modding a Pocket has always been a problem because that circuitry really wasn't built to handle the extra load from 3 really bright LEDs, even when current limited by a resister. But I'm not enough of an engineer to design a proper solution, though I have pondered it.
What I mean is, each pad of d-pad can give you a high or low voltage depending on whether it's open or closed, where an analog joystick produces a variable voltage instead of a hi/low voltage.
Ah, I see. I'm basically just gluing a joystick to the existing D-pad. Super simple, rugged, not complicated.
Ohhhhhhh okay. I get it. So just cosmetic. Derp derp...
Digital? The GBA is almost entirely analog. I'm simply converting the D-pad to a joystick... it's mechanics will remain unchanged.
What I mean is, each pad of d-pad can give you a high or low voltage depending on whether it's open or closed, where an analog joystick produces a variable voltage instead of a hi/low voltage.
if i get a chance soon, will post results! not worth it, at all, for the one-time mod, but perhaps for the modding shop people out there...