Gameboy dmg cpu internals how to#
Gameboy dmg cpu internals portable#

Gameboy dmg cpu internals how to#

Figuring how to program them properly was tricky because they’re used outside of their specified voltage range, even in a standard Game Boy

It uses the emulator Gnuboy and when Jeroen uses his own reproduction carts containing games not originally made for the Game Boy, Raspberry Pi Zero kicks in and runs the title natively. Making the build extra-special is its use of original carts, emulating the Game Boy experience so closely it’s difficult to tell if anything has changed. “Because of emulation, all of a sudden you can have access to games that originally ran on other consoles, some of which have specs way better than the original Game Boy.” Work hard, play hard “I did change the LCD a little bit by driving it in a smart way so that it can display 16 greys instead of the original four,” he enthuses.Īnd the upshot of that? “It ends up substantially increasing the number of games the Game Boy can play,” he continues. Jeroen has retained the buttons, cartridge port, speaker, and link port, with everything capable of being run from four AA batteries, just like the original. To speed things up, the emulator reads an entire region from a cart The original hardware had a direct connection to the cartridge, but Raspberry Pi Zero has to communicate with the FPGA via the SPI port. These are fixed either side of a new, printed circuit board, replacing the CPU, GPU, and memory.

That something includes a Raspberry Pi Zero computer and a replacement motherboard containing a lower power, high performance ICE40 field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The projects could look like a weird mutation and it made me think, what if I went the other way? What if instead of sacrificing the original looks for playability, I sacrificed playability for the original looks?” Welcome then, DMGPlus: a handheld that looks familiar but has its internals replaced by something more powerful. “Obviously this would work really well, but it went against the original Game Boy looks. “But because they wanted the thing to emulate as many consoles as possible, they usually went all-out with the modifications: high-resolution screen, Li-ion battery, HDMI and USB, multiple front buttons, shoulder buttons, the works,” he says.

Gameboy dmg cpu internals portable#

Like us, he’d seen a reasonable number of people modifying Game Boy cases to create portable RetroPie machines. You can’t tell the difference between the finished DMGPlus project and the original Game Boy – all the alterations are insideīut just as we thought we’d seen it all, along came Jeroen Domburg, aka Sprite_tm. We’ve seen makers either stuff a Raspberry Pi computer into an original case or buy off-the-shelf projects, such as the superb RetroFlag GPi, and create their own from scratch. The Nintendo Game Boy – the iconic handheld video game console launched in 1989 – is no stranger to the pages of The MagPi. In the latest issue of The MagPi Magazine, Jeroen Domburg showcases his refurbed Nintendo Game Boy.