WonderSwan Advance

pecka writes "There is an article about a guy who took apart his WonderSwan Color and inserted Gameboy Advance motherboard and screen into the WS case so he can play WS games along with GBA's ones. And yeah, it's in French so you better use Babelfish." I'd call that an impressive hack!

Comments

Re:I hope that sounds better in Japanese

[factor-C]

You don't understand what you're talking about. The Japanese grammatical structure is quite different from that of English. What you see on their clothes are English words written in Japanese grammatical structure. A Japanese person that knows the literal definition of the English words will know exactly what it means. In English, we say: Bob has long hair. In Japanese (literally translated to English) they would say: Long hair Bob has. It gets a lot wierder than that as you get into more complex sentence structure.

Basically those sayings are translated for a Japanese person that understands the literal definition of the words but uses Japanese grammatical structure. Knowing this, it may still seem strange, but then again we often associate nuances to words that are not part of their literal definition, so we may deem their choice of words inappropriate when they are in fact in keeping with the literal definition.

GBA games ONLY

[jx100]

The unit can ONLY play GBA games. The guy just chopped up a GBA motherboard and stuffed it into a Wonderswan case.

Re:GBA games ONLY

[_Bean_]

God I hate people like you. Perhaps you should read the article. Of course if the slashdot editor had done his job the article summary would be correct and we wouldn't have this problem.

Re:GBA games ONLY

[Dahan]

From Nintendo, I guess. See the © 2001 Nintendo at the bottom?

Really, it only plays GBA games. It's just the shell of a Wonderswan. Take a French class, then go read the article :)

Re:GBA games ONLY

[itarget]

He's quite correct, actually. It's just a GBA inside a wonderswan case with some rewiring.

If this is what threw you (not sure what the babelfish translation would look like, but I imagine it would be misleading):

"il a fallut retravailler l'intérieur pour la mise en place des 2 cartes mère"

He means that he had to rework the interior to make room for two motherboards, not cartridges.
In french, cartridge == cartrouche, not carte.
There's just one cartridge port, for gba cartridges, sort of sticking out the back. The wonderswan motherboard's only purpose is to handle the sound and buttons (then passing on the signals to the gba board behind it)

On a side note, it looks like it could be accidentally snapped off if a little too much pressure were applied horizontally across the top of the cartridge (like a slipping finger). That would suck. :-P

The WonderSwan FAQ

[Anonymous Coward]

http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/wswan/file/wonders wan_a.txt

For those of us who haven't heard of it before.

Re:The WonderSwan FAQ

[Nameles]

Erm.... Look at the bottom of all GameFAQs pages. No linking directly to FAQs

This is a WonderSwan

[CoreyGH]

Here are some pics of the WonderSwan from their japanese website for those wondering what it is. And this is the hompage for the WonderSwan.

Human translation of the first few paragraphs

[itarget]

The Wonderswan Advance is a unique machine made with two consoles; the WSC and the GBA.

It possesses two motherbards. One for connecting the controls of the original wonderswan, and the second as the heart of the unit running the games.

These 2 boards were soldered onto each other with about 40 solder points. Normally I would have soldered at least 50 points, but techncal problems prevented me from doing so.

The front face of the wonderswan, as you can see in the pictures, is blue-grey while the back face is transparent. You'll notice that a number of modifications were made to the unit to fit the motherboard of the GBA. The cartridge port as well as a number of components required me to enlarge the cartridge slot and make a number of holes to ensure that everything would fit properly. The final product isn't exactly of the best workmanship, though I must say that I didn't have the steadiest of hands while making it. I'm quite satisfied with the result, however; especially seeing as it's only a prototype.
Back on the front of the console, you'll notice in the photos that the power, start and sound buttons are missing. Why? It's simply because I had make room for the GBA's screen, which is much thicker than the wonderswan's original screen. I moved the start and sound buttons to the top left directional pad's Y1 and Y2 buttons, while attaching the GBA's L&R button to the remaining two between them. Playability suffers in some games like F-Zero due to the awkward position of the L&R buttons. The game remains playable nonetheless, and I can tell you it's pretty funny seeing F-Zero running on a wonderswan!

Concerning the plastic viewing window for the wonderswan's screen: I was afraid of losing a lot of the viewing area on the GBA's screen, but as it turns out, I didn't lose any from the sides and only lost three lines on the top and bottom.

As you know, there's a black border surrounding the screen on the GBA to counter the effect of shadows falling on the screen from along the edges of the screen cavity. The wonderswan doesn't have this. The problem with these shadows is that it becomes hard to tell where the screen ends... but unfortunately a black border wasn't put in the wonderswan to save on screen real-estate. I think I'll add a black border; I'll lose a few more pixels but the shadows will have less of an effect and it'll improve esthetics.

The unit only lasts a maximum of 7 hours, which is less than either of the original consoles, and that it uses two 1.5v AAA batteries.

The weight of the unit right now is about the same as a GBC. As I said above, the wonderswan advance is very compact, even though the cartridge sticks out the back 4-5mm.

(He then goes on to tell how he did it, and why. The short of the why is that he loves the WSC hardware but not bandai's poor support of the system)

English interview.

[KingSchlong]

I thought someone might be interested in this interview (in English) with the guys who made the Wonderswan Advance. It contains a couple of extra titbits of information.