17

(38 replies, posted in Nintendo Handhelds)

Did someone say Game Boy hardware development?

Basically, yeah.

If it helps give you ideas, my arduino is currently set up for OPL2 FM synthesis. smile Song data is streamed over USB from the host PC. It's a pretty simple circuit though. It wouldn't be too difficult to make a standalone synth with a simple chip. I'd like to see what you come up with though.

Here's a terrible picture of it if you're interested:

20

(40 replies, posted in Trading Post)

herr_prof wrote:

Which of the dropdown board settings do you choose in the arduino software?

Which ATmega does it have inside?

Theta_Frost wrote:

I'm not usually excitable enough to do this but here I am.  Any progress? big_smile

Unfortunately, no. I've put this project on hold for a while, partially due to school, but I've also got some other exciting chip-related projects going on. wink Progress on all of my projects is either slow or stopped at the moment, but hopefully I'll be able to get back to work on this stuff in the near future. The motherboard is pretty much at the bottom of the list of things to do though and there's a lot about it that I need to fix/make better.

22

(11 replies, posted in General Discussion)

The Triplett 9045 has served me well over the past five or six years. Also, depending on what you're doing, a lower cost alternative to an oscilloscope would be a logic analyzer. Even cheaper is a digital logic probe (and for debugging, my logic probe has saved me huge amounts of time).

mountainhead wrote:

Really? I've never heard of those being reversible. As far as being replaceable, it wouldn't matter. I don't have a soldering iron OR the skills to pull off the job, unfortunately.

Also, I don't mean to sound stupid, but what is mGB? The more of this stuff I learn about, the better.

DMG LCD Repair: http://8bc.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=5679
Otherwise you can just swap the front halves of two DMGs by pulling the ribbon cable out of the connector and plugging the other screen in.

mGB: http://code.google.com/p/arduinoboy/

You can easily fix vertical columns of dead pixels. Horizontal ones can't really be helped, but I've never seen them die on their own.

Bleepbloops work on pockets. I wouldn't worry about using DMGs though, they're practically indestructible. If they're going to die it's probably not because you're using them.

For the energy save one, press hold A and left on the D-pad until it cycles back into the right range of values.

I find that if I play anything in the noise channel on a Game Boy Color it skips about a third of the notes randomly. That's on multiple different ones too. DMGs and SPs work fine though.

NeX wrote:
kitsch wrote:

the PCB fabhouse will do that.  you don't assign colors in CAD design.  you tell your fab house what you want...  say, green soldermask with white print, or white soldermask with black print

but i assume this will be going via BatchPCB which from what i understand only does green PCBs, so i am wondering if there is a way to cheat by having the whole pcb screen printed white to get a white PCB.

Well, not BatchPCB for the motherboard, but something similar (probably 33each) unless I end up making a bunch of them at once. If I did a real order like that then I could choose the mask and silk colors. As far as inverting it goes, I'm not too sure about that. It would be a bit tricky and I'm not sure if the fab house would like that very much, but I'll look into it.

nitro2k01 wrote:

Ground planes, ground planes! And way bigger Vcc lines.

Yeah, I'm working on the ground planes as well, I just don't keep them on the board because it's such a hassle with EAGLE. The VCC lines will be a lot bigger and I'm going to work on turning it into a loop around the whole board instead of one little line that goes all the way around but doesn't connect.

Not too much. I re-routed the cart connector and work RAM, and removed the LEDs for the arduinoboy. I also added the pads for those springy contacts from the LCD PCB. That's about it I think. One of the last things I need to do now is fix the horrible layout of the VCC line, but I've been pretty busy. I do have something else in the works with NeX though. wink

EDIT: Nobody wants updates without pictures. tongue

Before I got a Transferer, my method was basically to boot the camera in a Super Game Boy, then take a screenshot with a USB video capturer and crop it in MS Paint. The Transferer is much nicer.

The size is 0603 and the number should be 103. Good luck. smile