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Now I'm going to sound like a massive dick, but I don't like this paper at all.

It's actually mostly factually correct as far as I could tell when skimming it through, but it feels very rushed. There are a few couple of small things that are wrong, like calling the MBC BSC, but that less important. But what I'm more worried about is that I'm wondering if the complete noob is actually going to learn anything substantial from the paper. It's written in such a way that I'm getting the feeling it was made to meet a school deadline, not out of a genuine will to teach. A lot of things could be probably be described in more understandable ways.

I'm bothered by the theory sections about transistor/logic and NTSC. They don't really fit in. The transistor/logic section could probably be scrapped. If you know about these things, you do. If you don't, that short text isn't going to make much of a difference for you. The NTSC section could probably be replaced with an actual diagram of how the screen is drawn, and when you can and can't write to it.

Then there's the coding guidelines. The first 3 points are sound advice, but last one isn't really. The <=, < etc operators typically have no or a very small overhead compared to == and !=. we only have a limited time window to perform our calculations (vertical synchronisation phase) <- That's not really correct. Just because you can't write freely to the display during most of the time doesn't mean you can't do math. And why make a float table of sine values? An integer table, even 16-bit integer, is better than that float table. And even so, theres no explanation on how you're actually supposed to use the lookup table.

The whole idea that the Gameboy is well documented but it is difficult to collect all the distributed informations on the internet. is largely untrue. There are a couple of good collected sources. Most importantly PANDocs which is a collection of a lot of small documents (some of them quoted in the paper) that was assembled about 10 years ago. It's both more informative and accurate than the quoted sources. (No undocumented GB cart pins etc...) Then there's devrs.com/gb which has many dead links nowadays but is still a good starting place. A little more research would've revealed those.

The paper doesn't at all mention that there are in fact commercial flashcarts for sale to this date. See here for example.

So uhm yeah... I'm sorry for the complete smackdown, but I honestly think a lot of things in the paper could have been better. Forward this post to Belial (or maybe not.)

All of the old LPT port Gameboy cartridge devices require direct access to the LPT which USB-LPT adapters typically can't provide. I don't think I recall I've heard a USB-LPT adapter success story, ever.

NO CARRIER: Hmm, so there are NES mappers like that... I guess I should rephrase my question: 999-IN-1 apparently doesn't support just any mapper, right? (Unless the NSF format is constructed to normally reside in a non-fixed bank on mappers that have fixed banks?) How difficult is it to find a suitable donor cart that is theoretically compatible? (Because that's how you do it right? Donor cart+EEPROM socket...)

And yes, I understand the concept of copying code to RAM. I've made a whole little "framework", if you could call it that, for Gameboy to allow code execution in RAM. (Framework=Useful routines and macros to realign jumps and loads, and a simple specification for a general purpose loader.) This is useful for two things: 1) Code that modifies flash memory on supported cartridges. (Such as my LittleFM.) 2) Allows code to be loaded into RAM, after which you can remove the cartridge and have the program keep running. The latter is only really stable on GBC.

Smartboy is a decent product, but they've been known to have some delivery problems in the past because their goods got caught in customs. I think you should ask Kitsch if he's aplnning to restock on smartboys before trying to buy directly from SB.

Sorry, I closed the wrong topic... Reopened.

Au contraire, mon ami! Most probably you only have access to a register to set the voltage to the piezo to high or low.

This kind of stuff reminds of Mr Beep's ZX Spectrum stuff.

mGB is probably the best option for that. LSDj can only be MIDI-controlled through the keyboard mode, which sucks ass.
I'd personally opt for syncing LSDj with a computer master and compose side by side, however. A little more work, but LSDj gives you a good amount of control, that a PC-side sequencer won't be able to give you.