Flash Carts For Gameboy

Brett Profitt writes: "Ever want to program for the Gameboy? What about uploading up to 3 roms to a cart and playing them later? Visit this web site to get info about how you can build your own Gameboy cart with flash memory. btw, if anyone actually gets one working, how about sending me one?" Unlike some DIY gaming-hardware sites, this one organizes the information readably and meticulously -- and shows some finished work that demonstrates more than a little bit of patience.

Comments

German site

[Shoeboy]

The english was pretty good, but it might be hard for fat people to understand. Fortunately I tranlated it into miguelspeak (the language of fattys) here.
--Shoeboy

Re:Is this legal?

[iCEBaLM]

Nothing nintendo can do about it. They can't force people into a license if you're not using anything of nintendo's actually make the part/addon/rom. You can go out, buy a gameboy, use it to develop your stuff on, and thats it. Nintendo has no authority to make you pay licensing fees, except to use their trademarks and "IP" which you wouldn't need if you did it all on your own.

-- iCEBaLM

Re:Is this legal?

[TheTomcat]

Uh..

Nothing the MPAA can do about it. They can't force people into a license if you're not using anything of the MPAA's actually make the DVD. You can go out, buy a DVD ROM, use it to get VOBs to run DeCSS on, and thats it. The MPAA has no authority to make you pay licensing fees, except to use their trademarks and "IP" which you wouldn't need if you did it all on your own.

Am I the only one seeing the parallels between the two? If this whole MPAA thing goes through, then we can certainly expect Nintendo to come after users of their products in any way they don't like. Scary stuff.

A test case for this technique

[yerricde]

Short: It's legal. The use of the bit pattern that produces the name Nintendo is termed "fair use."
Long story:

Search google.com for
[Sega trademark security system lawsuit ]
to read about a test case for requiring certain IP to be in every ROM. The court ruled Accolade was not liable, as Sega's technique attempted to bring copyrights to the scope of patents.

<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Demoscene has been using these for a loong time

[jeroenb]

The Gameboy Color demoscene is made possible by these and they've been at it for quite a while. For some interesting info about it, have a look here. For programming info (hey now that I'm posting links anyway =)), the C-based GBDK can be found here, along with info on how to code for the GB in Asm.

Is this legal?

[SClitheroe]

I seem to recall that Nintendo charges licensing fees in order to do development work for their hardware.

I realize this doesn't concern the hobbiest coder, who just wants to play around with their own gameboy. What happens though if somebody releases custom ROM files or even ROM carts, either for sale or open source. Would they then be a target for the Nintendo law-machine?

Re:Is this legal?

[tzanger]

Nothing nintendo can do about it. They can't force people into a license if you're not using anything of nintendo's actually make the part/addon/rom. You can go out, buy a gameboy, use it to develop your stuff on, and thats it. Nintendo has no authority to make you pay licensing fees, except to use their trademarks and "IP" which you wouldn't need if you did it all on your own.

Actually this is untrue.

The Gameboy processor runs a little routine in ROM which scrolls down the "Nintendo" logo. The bit pattern for the logo is in your ROM. After scrolling it, it then checks the bit pattern against a ROM copy and if they match, will go to execute your code. It is very easy to change the logo to whatever you want, but the game won't run. I guess their arguement is that the bit pattern to display "Nintendo" is copywright/trademarked and will get you on that front.

It is possible, through the use of a microcontroller or little bit of hardware (cap, resistor and maybe a transistor or gate) to display a different logo and still have the game run. This is done by having one area of the ROM appear at the proper location on powerup, but shortly thereafter (after the scroll), flip over to the "Nintendo" bit pattern so the pattern matches that in ROM and the game runs. I've done it myself and it's not hard. How much this protects you legally is another issue, however.

I know Game Genie gets around the licensing by making you have a cartridge. I believe this use of a bit pattern has been tested in court, but I don't know what the outcome was.

Re:Is this legal?

[dbarclay10]

Sort of. But, unfortunately, the MPAA is defending the Movie Industry(tm). Since movies are IP, and you'd be copying movies, then there are issues raised. But, with a game boy, the only thing that could be considered IP when making your own ROM with your own tools are the Game Boy's instruction sets - which have previously been declared as reverse-engineerable(Intel vs. AMD).

Dave

gameboy programming is great but SO badly doc'ed

[happystink]

I tried learning GB programming recently. I wish someone would put together a good site for beginners who want to code on the GB, cause most of the current informational sites are geared towards people who already have at least some experience in it. And man I'd like to start, SO bad!

Here is a site I'd love to see continued, or for anyone to build a similar one. Any GB developers reading this: Please make a totally though tutorial on GB Development and I will be happy. MAKE ME HAPPY!

sig:

Re:Cart racing is cool

[Tei'ehm Teuw]

Go fast turn left! NASCAR is clearly the most exciting to watch.

BUNG carts have done this for years...

[torpor]

I've been using my BUNG cart kit for the last year to upload up to 30 ROM's to one cart. If you can still buy them in the US, they're a much better investment than to build your own ... work quite well.

Nothing like having a library of 1000's of games at hand for the gameboy, though I have to admit that the thrill of playing GB has gone. I think that a big part of the 'mystique' about the GB scene from a consumer perspective was in *NOT* having all the cartridges - you buy one, play it for a while, etc. When you've got 1000's of ROM's at hand, and you can choose your own game selection to carry 30 games with you, the GB gets boring fast.

You start to see just how mundane the game design industry really is, when you've had access to hundreds of games in a matter of hours. I think this same effect is experienced by Game Magazine reviewers, and I start to see just how jaded things can be...

Maybe the real reason that game mfr's don't want everyone to have every ROM instantly downloadable in a large gigantic mega-library is the fact that by having access to it, people start to see just how crappy things really are in the design realm ...

I certainly stopped playing GB for a while after I got my cart setup...

DIY Gameboy programming

[Tom7]

I love programming for the Gameboy -- it's really fun to have the ridiculous constraints of the Z80; a nice contrast to hacking high level langauges. There's also a lot of documentation around. I'm using the free RGBASM assembler, which is quite good.

I just bought a GameLink from the UFO guys ( http://www.cd64.com/ ) on "Fuk Wa" (really!) Street in Hong Kong. Programming and running your creations on an emulator is pretty good, but nothing beats seeing it on an actual gameboy. No linux support for the GameLink, though other devices do have open specs and C code.

Nintendo recently shut down another company which makes these devices called " Bung "; this is really disappointing to me. It's probably true that most people use these things for piracy, but I really am using mine legitimately.

On the other hand, I understand that the GB game "Harvest Moon" began as a amateur project. So maybe there is still hope for Nintendo...

You have to learn to crawl before you can walk...

[Mark A. Rhowe]

How to get started programming for the GAMEBOY:

http://www.loirak.com/prog/gbprog.htm

Not exactly news.

[Toodles]

The GBDEV scene has been out for a very long time now.WHile I dont want to downplay Mr. Ziegler's work (I visit his site veyr frequently), there is more information available for it than you could ever use.

GB dev is one of the most refined console dev groups out there. The information on the processor (modified z80) is well know and documented, and easy to code for. Complete IDE's are available, using GCC as the compiler, links into a .ROM file, and starts up the emulator to run. Emulators such as the new VGBWIN provide excellent debugging platforms, showing tilesets, memory/variable contents, and easy step-throughs.

The hardware for this flash cart requires some serious soldering on a very fine point scale; I hate doing it. For those interesting in GBdev, check out some of the sites available like:

www.otakunozoku.com //z80 asm cribsheet rules, and the RGBDS is a good platform for asm game dev.

www.vintagegaming.com //for emulators, suggest VGBWIN

www.consoledev.com //many documents and links

www.devrs.com // Jeff's been the best and most widely respected hacker on the gameboy. Has all of the links needed to get you up and running.

Dont worry about the hardware, just download the free (and usually open source) software to compile stuff for game boy, read the documentation available, test your code out on an emulator, and then, after all of this work, if you REALLY want to see it on a real GB, then buy the parts instead of spending the time soldering your own. www.cd64.com has black carts and reader/writers available at a very respectable price.

Toodles
Into GBDev, PSXDev, and DCDev