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Songboy Turns GameBoys into MP3 Players
farfisa sent us linkage to
Songboy which is a $99 addon for a gameboy which allows it to play MP3s. I just used my to play B mode tetris (Start at level 9 with the blocks all the way up and try to get 25 lines: total adrenaline). Its pretty amazing how general purpose these ancient little devices have turned out to be.
This "pluggable" MP3 player for the Gameboy reminds me a whole lot of the Handspring "Springboard" MP3 player from Innogear. The MiniJam Player uses the same approach as this Gameboy product uses of inserting a module with a DSP, stero-out, and memory; and leaving the "host" hardware to do management functions.
I might actually buy the player from Innogear: I just love those buttons on the top (ala MiniDisc)! It is just too bad they had to go with a proprietary flash memory spec. Bummer.
For the MiniJam spec in PDF, click here.
-AP
I think the fish finder's a cooler hack. At least that uses the gameboy as a something more than just a display.
i pherals/pocketsonar.html
http://members.xoom.com/nintendorep/gameboy/per
-=- SiKnight
I got a Rio PMP300 for $99 about a month ago... I can certainly see the geekiness of a gameboy that plays MP3s, but I think the costs outweigh the benefits in this case... it's less portable, it has less RAM, there is not, AFAIK, a good solid codebase of open source to support it, there's no reason to believe it's going to use anything but a proprietary memory expansion (ie probably not compact flash or smartmedia) and of course it presupposes you already own a game boy, which I don't. Since the Gameboy's CPU doesn't have the strength required to do this on it's own, we assume that this thing will have a processor on board, so essentially it's just a slightly dumbed-down Rio that's permanently tethered to a Game Boy, for the same price... the ONLY benefit I can see is that it can use the display for visualization or some other optical goodies (the page lists album covers, lyrics, etc), and this is not a good enough reason to warrant the drawbacks, IMHO. Game boy owners, just buy a Rio and have two excellent devices that are specilized to their respective tasks, and do them well.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
... in the gbdev mailing list. I run the archive at mixdown.org/gbdev.
:-)
The add-on would be a DSP or fast processor because, as one poster correctly put it, the GB processor (a bitched-up Z80) simply does not have the balls to decode an MP3 stream at any usable rate.
I too consider a GB MP3 device totally useless. A RIO gives you all that, has more memory (IIRC) and is better on batteries, to boot. The GB can't even be used as a (proper) audio output because there is only a single pin on the GB cartridge you can inject audio on, so that leaves stero operation out. Unless they've somehow used the GB sound chip in its digitized mode.
The people in that list have a lot of great ideas, but some seem to want to push the platform too far (read: beyond something economically worthwhile). Things like MP3 addons, PDA software, raycasted 3D graphics and <cough> a multitasking OS are, IMHO, a waste of effort and brainpower for otherwise bright minds. However... full-colour imagery, robotics and a multitude of cheap computing projects are well worth the effort.
If you've got one and you want to hack it, join up. You can buy Bung's cartridge to transfer your software to a real GB or use one designed by one of the list gurus. There are some people in there who do GB code for a living, others who are under Nintendo NDAs, and even others who seem to know more than Nintendo themselves knows about the GB.