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Raspberry Pi Gameboy
An anonymous reader writes: An enterprising hacker took on a project to rebuild a broken Gameboy using emulation software, a Raspberry Pi, and a few other easily-obtainable parts. The result: success! The hacker has posted a detailed walkthrough explaining all of the challenges and how they were solved. "Using a Dremel, I cut out a most of the battery compartment as well as some posts that on the case for the LCD that would no longer be needed. Doing so, the Pi sits flush with the back of the DMG case. ... The screen was the first challenge. The screen runs off 12V out of the box which wouldn't work with the USB battery pack. The USB battery pack is rated at 5V, 1000mAH so the goal was go modify the screen to allow it to run at 5V. ... I finally got it to work by removing the power converter chip as well as soldering a jumper between the + power in and the resister on the top right."
The important question for me would be: can I plug in any of my Gameboy carts and expect it to play the game? That would actually be fairly trivial but nobody seems interested in something like that. It's just a Z80 and the whole schematic is published.
I bought a Zelda Gameboy Advance cart at a used game store just last night. The Gameboy Advance SP still rocks, esp. if you get a model 101 version. It's so perfectly balanced, and plays any Gameboy cart going all the way back to the earliest that I fail to understand why anybody would even bother 'emulating' it with new hardware.
The story is misleading in this, but see TFA and a lot of the article is how he fitted a brand new 3.5" 640x480 screen (which is impressive in res and price by the way)
The summary didn't make sense anyway : Game Boy runs at 6 volts, not 12 volts so it was not about using the Game Boy's screen at all.