209 Topic by friendofmegaman

(4 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Hi guys,

I came across this listing today:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-Rare-Gameboy- … 338d44955a

3 rare gameboys for $999 dollars. White, blue and Manchester United.
I don't usually bitch about stuff but this one pissed me off. The person says:

"These are the 3 rarest DMG Game Boy systems produced. I've been an avid collector for many years and now I'm selling these to pay for a new PC.

All have original battery covers that still fit snuggly.

You won't find these 3 systems very often. The blue one in particular is incredibly rare."

Now this is a lie. The problem is that a lot of people really think these are that rare and cost that much. I can see that looking at the various forums and retro gaming web sites. But they're not. Blue one for instance is not rare at all!

Let me prove my point:

1. Blue gameboy

Go to ebay.de and search gameboy blau. Last time I checked there were 10 of them and they cost in average 30-70 Euro + up to 10 Euro delivery. So you can get a nice CIB boy straight away for $100. Now if you check for new auctions from time to time you cat get much cheaper deal. I got 3 already for less than $50.

2. White gameboy

This guy is rare for sure. But they appear from time to time on ebay. At the moment there are 2 of them. They cost around $150. Pricey but not fucking $1000 as the aforementioned seller requests.

3. Manchester united

These can be found at ebay.co.uk, cost around 70 pounds which is about $120. Pricey? Indeed. Any close to $1000? Nope. Rare? Sort of, but not really.

So $100+$150+$120 = $370

So, sorry for being an asshole I just wanted to let you all know what is the real price of these guys. By 'real' I mean the usual buy it now price. If you're patient enough you can get much better deal that that and it will be even cheaper. So please don't fall for the false description and spread this message to raise awareness.

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210 Reply by friendofmegaman

(24 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

can you share a picture of your wiring?

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211 Reply by friendofmegaman

(244 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

uXe wrote:

...if you want ease-of-use and cross-platform-compatibility on the computer side, then you could take an old PS2 EyeToy webcam which contains a OV519 camera-to-USB processor, and then use your Arduino to take the GameBoy's video data and bend it into a format that matches what the camera sensor sends into the OV519!

This sounds like an interesting idea, but I think it's way too complicated. There should be easier way to do it. I just haven't found it yet smile

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212 Reply by friendofmegaman

(244 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

It seems that serial over USB can actually send data quite fast. May be I can actually forward bits to PC...

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213 Reply by friendofmegaman

(244 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Jazzmarazz wrote:

Don't buy a Due, but the Teensy 2.0 for $16 and see if you can't work with the port manipulation (DDRD) for the 5 inputs because this would be the fastest. Serial over USB may actually be fast enough to send something...why did you think it would not work?

Yah, you're right, it can actually... for some reason I had and old crappy RS232 in mind o_O

Jazzmarazz wrote:

Wait ...where is uh....the FPGA? All I see if an xmega128

Doesn't seem like and FPGA to me.  But it's just a DAC to feed the oscilloscope, I don't see much use for my project.

Anyways I have an UNO board which is 16MHz I'm not sure it will suffice to transmit 4M bps

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214 Reply by friendofmegaman

(244 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

I saw this mod by NeX. What he did is modded an SNES and a Super GameBoy and crammed everything into a video cassette. This approach will definitely give you the best picture with the SGB frame, colors in some games and other extras. It's a brilliant idea and definitely a way to go for TV output especially now when there are loads of cheap SNES clones (in the end of a day you don't need authentic Nintendo hardware for that apart from Super GameBoy cartridge).

However I don't want to just reproduce it since it was already done. I'd like to try something new. I haven't seen a decently working capture device so far. I know that snesy (an FPGA guy from Germany) works on the similar project, but I'm not sure if he actually finished it, I found it quite hard to contact him.

Anyways, I don't think an FPGA and SNES are the only options. My ultimate goal is to get the 'raw' pixel data to PC where I could mess with it. Play with extrapolation, add color, try various effects etc.

If you like Arduino you could try this library. With the powerful enough board you might be able to draw pixels on the screen. But it will be monochrome, while SNES mod is way better smile

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215 Reply by friendofmegaman

(244 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

WiFi or Ethernet?

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216 Topic by friendofmegaman

(244 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

I'd like to 'stream' video from a DMG or a Pocket into my laptop. I know it can be done with FPGA, but I don't want to get into it unless I absolutely have to.

What we need is basically an interface fast enough to send bits to the PC.

We have 5 (0V-5V) outputs from CPU which are (1) Clock, (2) Horizontal Sync, (3) Vertical sync, (4) Data 0, (5) Data 1

We could either stream bits with 4M Bps (since the clock speed is 4MHz) of course half of the time there's no useful data but it's just a rough estimate.

Or we stream the whole frames with 160*144*2*60 bps that is 350K Bps.

Arduino Due and Teensy appear to have more than enough clock speed and memory to handle this. The question is what interface will do the job? Serial and UART won't work, USB HID is manageable with huge frame loss - this option is highly undesirable.

The very best solution would be to use the same protocol as webcams. Thus we won't need additional drivers and stuff. But I can't find the spec.

Alternatively it's possible to build an ad-hoc interface and write a driver, but this won't be cross-platform.

Ideas?

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217 Reply by friendofmegaman

(19 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

12ianma wrote:

I really thought this info was already out there.... Since like 2 other people got it since I was flamed for not publishing. Nice work!

Thanks smile I too thought there should be a tutorial or at least a nice photograph. But sadly no. Or I wasn't lucky enough to find one.

Anyways glad you find it helpful guys, feel free to drop me a line have you got any troubles reproducing it.

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218 Reply by friendofmegaman

(19 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

katsumbhong wrote:

Sweet!

More pics?

I can certainly do more pictures, but what exactly you'd like to see?
this one should be enough to reproduce the mod smile
Just check with the pinout I provided in the first post. You can also check with the pocket PCB because it has numbers 1 and 18 near the corresponding connector pins, this is how I knew where to solder the wires.
If there's a big interest in this mod I can probably make a tutorial, but not today I'm too freakin tired of messing with the wires big_smile

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219 Reply by friendofmegaman

(19 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Done!

Turns out the connector was glitchy, so I put a piece of paper under the LCD ribbon cable. Anyways if you're careful (unlike me) in desoldering the pocket connector you should be fine smile

Here it is:

The pinout and a PNG I posted in the first topic are correct and will work, enjoy smile

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220 Reply by friendofmegaman

(19 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

I figured where the original LCD gets V1-V5 and updated the big PNG (here's the new link: http://i.imgur.com/NMbkHtv.jpg, also updated in the original post) , but it still doesn't work. I think the pocket connector I'm using may be buggered (but then again, multimeter shows correct voltages on the pins as far as I can tell). I really really really don't want to solder the wires directly to the bloody pocket LCD. Anyways... continuing my research...

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221 Topic by friendofmegaman

(19 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Hi,

I saw this was done by someone and now I'm trying to repro it. I came up with the mapping between the pocket LCD pins and DMG LCD pins, however the bloody thing doesn't work.

So here's (in my understanding) the Pocket LCD pinout (numbering is as on the pocket PCB and naming is as in the DMG schematic I took from http://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/images/e/e1/Ga … play.gif):

1 - GND
2 - Control
3 - Data latch
4 - Horiz Sync
5 - Data 0
6 - Data 1
7 - Clock
8 - Alt Sig
9 - V5
10 - V3
11 - V2
12 - Data latch
13 -VSYNC
14 - Vcc (5 volts)
15 - Alt sign
16 - V1
17 - V4
18 - V5

Where V1-V5 are ouputs from the contrast regulator chip (or how is it called correctly?)

Here's the link to a rather huge PNG (so you could see everything) with all the pins mentioned above on the DMG front PCB (with the LCD desoldered) - http://i.imgur.com/NMbkHtv.jpg

In my understanding numbers 1-5 on the DMG front PCB are indicate V1-V5 outputs (seems that traces lead to the corresponding pins on IR3E02 if wasn't mislead by something).

So when I soldered everything together here's what I get on the screen:

And here's my testing setup:

I suspect that I incorrectly hooked V5, but if you guys have any idea please let know. I'll keep you updated smile

Cheers!

UPDATE:
I figured where the original LCD gets V1-V5 and updated the big PNG, but it still doesn't work. I think the pocket connector I use may be buggered (but then again, multimeter shows correct voltage on the pins as far as I can tell). I really don't want to solder the wires directly to the bloody pocket LCD smile Anyways... continuing my research...

UPDATE:
The problem was the connector. So the PNG and pinout are correct.

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222 Reply by friendofmegaman

(4 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Ult … Inversion/

You'll get much clearer picture in the end smile

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223 Reply by friendofmegaman

(18 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Oops, yah I was totally wrong, I completely forgot about the switch. Sorry about that smile

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224 Reply by friendofmegaman

(18 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

AFAIK the speaker is not dependent on the jack PCB.

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