Have you tried putting in a pair of heaphones to the headphone jack? (Just exhausting possibilities.) Try disconnecting the LCD board and then turning the thing on with headphones connected.
WARNING: never connect or disconnect the LCD board while the Gameboy is powered on. This may damage the CPU in such a way that the left and B buttons stop working permanently!

The problem may be related to the power converter. The unregulated power from the batteries is connected through the power switch and then only to two places, the power converter, and the power LED. The fact that the LED lights up really only means that the power switch is working.

Do you have a multimeter?

498

(27 replies, posted in General Discussion)

The plastic used in ICs is typically an epoxy resin, as opposed to a thermoplastic. A thermoplastic will melt and solidify with temperature, whereas as an epoxy will set through a chemical reaction and won't melt. They are also mechanically rigid, excellent electrical insulators, anhydrous  and chemically inert, all of which are anywhere between highly desirable and required features for devices used in production of electronics. Now, the problem is that most or all bioplastics are thermoplastics. This is great for 3D printing, but not so great for chips.

For example, you'd be hard pressed to find a bioplastic which has a high enough melting point to tolerate soldering which will reach a minimum of 200 ºC for reflow soldering, more for other methods, including manual soldering with a soldering iron.
Other problems that I would predict: Poor bonding to the die and bond wires, which will let moisture creep in and destroy the die. Poor heat conductivity. Might melt or otherwise react with the die and destroy it. Might melt from the heat generated by the die and become a good enough conductor on the microscopic level to create faults. Might have unsuitable dielectric properties and leak high frequency signals between different  nearby traces on the die.

But the kicker is that the tiny amount of plastic used in the production of a chip i probably the least of the problems environmentally speaking. A typical consumer product will contain in the order of hundreds to thousands amount the plastic used in the chip in the case. Producing the die requires the use of various nasty chemicals, for example trichloroethylene which is used for washing the die. Any serious manufacturer will keep their trichloroethylene in a closed loop system, but to mention a famous example, there was a leak in the facilities of MOS Technology, Commodore's chip plant, which forced the city to build a water pipeline from a nearby city because the groundwater was ruined. How do the less scrupulous Chinese IC manufacturers dispose of their chemicals I wonder?

But my bottom line, and this may perhaps sound a bit hostile, is that you can't just slap a buzzword onto an industrial process. If something hasn't been tried it's often because it's not a good idea.

If you want to go the extra mile (kilometer) you could set up Wine and run BGB. Wine on OSX is a bit of a hassle as far as I remember, but BGB should officially work in Wine, and it can record directly to a wav file.

500

(7 replies, posted in Bugs and Requests)

Have you tried the Snow scheme?

I was bored, so I sat down to try to make the layout smaller. Here's what I came up with. I removed the J2 jumper, added a diode, and also flipped the header to the YM_MINI 180 degrees which made the routing easier. It's now completely single-sided.

With a ground plane:

It works on the GBA. It's just that you can't put an old GB program on a GBA cartridge.

503

(7 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

The NL Two cartridge cannot run original Gameboy software. (And also probably doesn't have additional ROM space.)

e.s.c.'s advice is slightly wrong (sowwy). The demo ROM is useless for you. What you need is the update ROM. Get it here and follow the isntructions: http://www.nanoloop.de/midi/two.html
The point of note is that you need to press select+start before the logo is finished animating.  This allows a program to be downloaded into the GBA's RAM, which then updates (or in your case, overwrites the incorrect data).

Actually, I realize I have a really old (and dirty) DMG that I bought cheaply on an auction for its low serial number, and it has this problem. Unfortunately, after a quick analysis, I don't think the particular problem is related to bad/low value capacitors, but how the sound circuit in the CPU chip is constructed. It seems like when you turn the wave channel off, (which has to be done to reload the sample buffer) it returns to a DC level way outside of the amplitude range of the wave channel. My antispike fix isn't of much help either. Unfortunately, I don't think the problem is fixable. I will try some things, but don't keep your hope up.

If you have a motherboard that does this, feel free to send it to me for analysis.

506

(21 replies, posted in Nintendo Consoles)

Limitbreak wrote:

But what is it...?

It's a competition cartridge which Nintendo used for competitions on game fairs and similar events.

507

(3 replies, posted in General Discussion)

Page 2, "mode7 gba intro01.mod"
big_smile

508

(12 replies, posted in General Discussion)

The reason there is a download link is because it would be easy to download the file anyway (unless you put in some complex protection against it, which we didn't feel like doing.) Even Bandcamp lets you listen to the tracks, and with a little bit of magic, download them without paying. But iirc, the available files are in a lower quality, like 128 kbps MP3, so that is supposed to be the discouragement against that.

509

(16 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

The cyan one look like an aftermarket shell, yes. Note the missing headphone indicator. The purple one is not exactly a Fortune. The Fortune SY-3000B (aka Bitman 3000B) has a different groove pattern, and also has plastic buttons instead of rubber.

Ah, that's why I asked. I've heard OSX can be unreliable for MIDI sysex. Possibly related, I found this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8148 … osx-broken

tl;dr MIDI commands can be timestamped, and this is not recommended for sysex messages. I wonder what the NL transfer application does. Perhaps I should contact Oliver about this and check...

While I cannot comment on the front light, imo the GBC screen is horrible. It has a special kind of flicker, especially noticeable when you move your eyes' focus from one part of the screen to another. This is similar to the flicker on a CRT TV/monitor with a low refresh rate, or a badly designed fluorescent tube, if you're sensitive to that kind of thing. It can be just plain annoying. Your mileage may vary.

GB Pocket and GBC are using the same connector. However, I've found that using a GBP/C style link cable doesn't give the most stable connection. It can easily move to the side and lose contact if you're not careful. I personally own a link cable which has both type of connector on each end, so I can connect a DMG to a GBC, or a use the DMG connector on one side to connect to the NL adapter, which is more stable.

Are you sure that you're connecting the cable the right way around to the NL adapter? (Ie, not upside down, or randomly each time.) Which OS are you using?

I might try to do a ROM for diagnosing the problem. Do you have another working flash cartridge as well?