129

(14 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Link?

I doubt the innards are fake, unless they are obviously using something that looks like a new LCD. Rather, I would guess that they are repro cases with refurbished/reused electronics.

Should work now.

131

(8 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Zetetica wrote:

Yeah this is an easy solution but kind of annoying fix, because you have to use a hot soldering iron and reconnect the bottom ribbon cable wires by running the iron across and getting it hot enough that it doesn't actually melt the ribbon cable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7D4wZ6a1ZA

Different problem.

132

(8 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Try checking the solder connections between the board and the LCD ribbon cable that is under the screen. Likely, something has come loose which makes it not drive the horizontal lines at all.

Saskrotch wrote:

I thought this said "preserve his honor" and I was like have you MET the guy?

I have now restored my honor by removing that typo. (The typo wasn't "honor" but repeating the word "horror" in the sentence.)

Glomag, in case you didn't know, is one of the early players in the LSDj scene. But he's a man with many talents. He was also horror movie music composer in the '80s. Now he's looking to preserve those movie scores before they rot away in the dark. That's what this kickstarter campaign is for. And some of the rewards are chiptune related. Go check it out!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cb … film-compo

What I meant was that while the mod was incorrectly installed, this problem existed and could have damaged the CPU or inverter (but probably didn't). Although thinking about it, I forgot this mod board has you lift the pin, so the inverter output would never have been connected to the CPU output unless there's an excessive blob of solder that touches the pad. Which also means that you shouldn't really have to cut the traces at all if you're careful when installing the board.

136

(10 replies, posted in General Discussion)

Hnclone01 has been posting all over the internet about how he "found" this cool song. So I mod-abused this thread a little bit, hehe.

catskull wrote:

The yellow line is the trace coming off the via to the CPU pin. So the header pin I soldered the chip to wasn't contacting the CPU pin at all.

Yes. And also, if you don't also cut below the via, you're connecting an output to an output! The deadly sin. (At least potentially deadly to the chip outputs although it probably didn't cause permanent damage in this case.)

catskull wrote:

As a side note, what the heck is the deal with this HHL bivert board needing the wire for ground? There's a ground on the LCD board right on the end with a huge blob you could easily bridge. What's the deal with that? Kind of makes me want to make my own bivert board with only a 2 gate chip. I really like the design of the HHL board otherwise.

Or, you could use a smaller inverter chip and use one of the grounds in the 6 pin array. Hmm!

138

(14 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Not sure that will work as expected for anything below 5 V at least. I think that circuit will make the emitter follow slightly below the base voltage up to a base voltage of 5 V. Plus, it has the disadvantage of needing to break out +5V from the link port.

139

(14 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

The short answer is, it would depend. The long answer is: At least DMG (not sure about GBC etc) has protection diodes on the link port inputs which will conduct anything above 5 V plus the diode drop to Vcc. What actually happens depends on the output impedance of the module, and how much current the Gameboy is using from Vcc. Usually, a synth module will have its outputs coupled in series with something like a 1k resistor, mainly to protect from a short circuit if you connect an output to an output.

So that gives you something to do a rough calculation on. 10 V-5 V=5V. 5 V/1000 ohm=5 mA. So, the Gameboy must use (ie be able to absorb) >5 mA to survive. If we go by the 0.7 W rating on the back, it will use maybe a maximum of 0.7 W/5 V=140 mA. Less than that typically, but ballpark figure much higher than 5 mA. Especially with a backlight installed.

Note that this is not guaranteed behavior. A short 10 V pulse edge might still slip through and destroy something. The safety calculation I made above relies on the module having an output series resistor, which it may not have. Using one module might work, but using another might destroy the Gameboy.

What would be better is to make a sync adapter with a series resistor and parallel zener diode to guarantee protection from excessive voltage.

DMG schematic: http://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/DMG_Schematics

Random - Micawber's Moan.

4mat wrote:

I'm surprised the editor can literally run out of rastertime though, what sort of effects are causing that?

In LSDj, tempo is governed by the timer interrupt. In addition There are 5 raster interrupts per screen refresh that are used for sample buffer refresh and HF vibrato/pitch slide. Because the timer interrupt is not synchronous to the frame rate, it can happen at any time, even during VBlank. Johan made the decision to make the UI run in the main thread and use a counter to communicate that a VBL interrupt had happened. The interrupt does almost nothing more than increment the counter, and the mainloop decrements the counter every time it has processed one UI frame. This means that when the program is out of CPU power, the UI will suffer first.

XyNo wrote:

You can add the Supergameboy CPU in a good old DMG ! I think it is the best solution for what you need !
You can do it because this guy did it and some other modders did it too !!!

Nice, but all it does is boot faster because it doesn't have the boot logo animation. It does nothing to improve playback of CPU heavy songs.

143

(37 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

urbster1 wrote:

nitro since you're in this thread, are you still planning to add song saving to the current project in littleFM? as well as some of the other features?

I might do this at some point, but I don't consider very important. Let me explain. One of the main goals of littleFM is increased data security. That's why it has flash saving. Apart from expanding the memory, it also serves as non-volatile backup if the cart battery should fail. That's why the load function has strict error checking, and will abort loading the file if it finds any errors. Errors that would go undetected with the regular file manager. (Side note: LSDj did add some sort of error detection on song load just two weeks ago, but I haven't had time to look at exactly what it does.)
I don't see any similar benefit from adding song saving. It would mostly only make song saving faster. (3 seconds to save a typical song probably isn't unrealistic as a goal.) That is not to say I will never implement it, just that it doesn't obviously have as much benefit as the current existing functionality.

BGB auto saves every 256 seconds, so every 4 minutes, 16 seconds according to the author of the program. I don't think there's a way to automatically save more often than that. The easiest way to force the save data to be written to disk is probably to reset the CPU, which you can do with numpad * or fn+P on many laptops.

Could you please clarify the following? It sounds like a potential bug, if it's actually true.

Blitzer wrote:

but may actually save nothing and loading that file will just use your last .SAV that you actually did through the game (even though the 'file time' updates in your OS), can anyone confirm/deny this as well?