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Gameboy CT scan – design lessons learned
- mrmattyboy 5y agoNot sure what's the most amazing bit... the CT scanning, the information, the imagery, the 3d models of the CT scans or the fantastic page design! :WOW:
- grozzle 5y agoEverything is beautiful except the top-heavy upside-down 8s are haunting me.
- aib 5y agoWhat page are you talking about? All I see is a hard-to-read white-on-black quarter page of text that takes longer to scroll through than to read and animated GIFs.
- scrollaway 5y agoThe imagery is impressive but the site is buggy at least on my device. It took me a few reloads to see more than a blurry mess in place of the images.
- shp0ngle 5y agoThe information is never really that deep and I have no idea what I’m actually looking at.
- kanwisher 5y agowow that's a pretty amazing web design for such a technical topic
- kwhitefoot 5y agoIt's horrible. Doesn't scroll properly, half the text is unreadable because it won't stay in the window. I gave up reading it.
- aemreunal 5y agoGlad to see they're starting to implement permalinks to the scans of individual devices. Looking forward to going back and seeing old scans!
- johnflan 5y agoIt feels like this site is a marketing effort yet to reveal itself.
- Swenrekcah 5y agoI wish all marketing was like this then!
- solarkraft 5y agoAnd an amazing one at that.
- Fnoord 5y ago2022: Valve releases the Steam Deck -only slightly more expensive than the Nintendo Switch- allowing the user to play all past Nintendo games, using the power of Linux. Oh, and it has Steam support as well. Oh, and you can and may jailbreak/root it out of the box. Oh, and it runs SteamOS, based on Arch. Oh, and it doesn't have joy drift (OK, don't know about that one, we'll have to see).
- causi 5y agoThat's my biggest concern with the Steam deck. It's too expensive to not replace the analog sticks and buttons from time to time but I haven't heard Valve commit to long term parts availability.
- phatfish 5y agoValve do have a lot of experience with hardware at this point, if it was their first device I would be worried. Also they have committed to repairability with the tear down video if I remember correctly. Then again, experience with hardware design didn't stop Nintendo releasing a critically flawed design for a ~25 year old invention.
- causi 5y agoYou can't buy replacement components for the Steam Controller. You also can't buy replacement components for their VR controllers, including for the thousand dollar Valve Index, which by the way also suffers from *drumroll* analog stick drift.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoI had hoped to find downloads to the raw data...
- jeffalo 5y ago
- KennyBlanken 5y agoIf anyone is wondering why they go from focusing on heaping praise on the design of the controllers to...uh...the side rails and heat pipe of the Switch(?), it's probably because joycon controllers fail shockingly fast, and Nintendo has done nothing to improve their design despite raking in truckloads of cash. This, however, is tripe: > For more than 30 years, Nintendo has stayed true to its holistic philosophy that making great experiences is about more than any given component or specification. This integrated approach to design, engineering, and manufacturing has helped them remain dominant in a space where rivals have come and gone time and again. More like: Nintendo has stayed true to endless recycling of its IP which keeps game development cheap, while underspec'ing their hardware, figuring that game developers will slave away figuring out how to still make games run and users will grumble but put up with abysmal performance and graphics quality. People might be shocked to know that the switch's giant screen is 720p, 30hz. Even in 2017, that was pretty terrible. They're desperately milking the Switch for whatever they can wring out of it, too - the recent OLED update shows the desperation. They went with a new display technology that adds little to nothing...because the SoC is so anemic, it can't possibly handle higher resolutions or framerates. Describing them as "dominant" is a joke, too. Nintendo hasn't had market dominance since the NES; their console sales numbers are quite in line with Sony and Microsoft.
- solarkraft 5y agoYour points are valid. The hardware is something like a bad Android tablet with a few buttons. Which makes it more amazing that they're still selling a ton of them. RE recycling IP: This won't go well indefinitely (and it seems like they're not introducing anything new), but we're right in the middle of a nostalgia hype, so for now if works very well for them.
- Fnoord 5y agoIts not that amazing from my PoV that they're selling these. I can totally imagine a parent being like: I want to give my child a portable gaming device with fun games which are for their age, somewhat modern, yet part of the Nintendo IP. Enter the Nintendo Switch. It just proves the point that the Nintendo IP is strong, even if the games are not graphical high points. Its all about the gameplay and the characters.
- kuang_eleven 5y agoThat was painful to try to read... "Clever" design that abuses scrolling, provide only a miniscule amount of info and outright breaks on browser zoom is a nightmare.
- npretto 5y agotry increasing font size with [cmd]+[+] instead of using pinch-to-zoom, it works perfectly for me with that
- laurensr 5y agoI regret to see they skipped the Gameboy Advance SP and Gameboy Micro. The former was quite popular because it was the last console that played Gameboy Color games.
- skhr0680 5y agoSP was popular because it was what the Advance should have been to start. I got an Advance at release and the screen was really nice when I could strain my eyes enough to see anything. My other favorite Nintendo “WTF” is anything to do with the N64 controller, look it up a teardown if you’re bored
- ogogmad 5y ago> I got an Advance at release and the screen was really nice when I could strain my eyes enough to see anything. I seem to remember you could get the picture to fill up the screen. I wouldn't be surprised if this introduced some artifacts though.
- vanderZwan 5y agoI think GP is referring to the unlit, relatively low-contract LCD screen that was only readable in bright light conditions. The SP was better, but only somewhat: it had a button for front-lit lighting so the image quality was still pretty mediocre. I presume to save battery life, since a back-lit would have lead to much more light loss.
- max-m 5y agoA couple years after the GBA SP (AGS-001) a new revision of it, the AGS-101, came to market. That revision used a backlit screen and the toggle button allowed you to switch between a dim and bright backlight mode. If my memory serves right games on that revision looked like they would on the original Nintendo DS. Obviously battery life took a significant hit compared to playing on the AGS-001 with the frontlight disabled.
- rob74 5y agoWhen they started out with the original Gameboy, I wondered "why are they doing a CT scan when they could just disassemble it?", but with the newer devices it quickly becomes apparent that getting to all the internals has become more challenging recently...
- possiblelion 5y agoI am pleasantly surprised each time these scans make it to HN. Something to look forward to each month. Who runs this?
- LeifCarrotson 5y agoI'm not sure who runs it, but I can confirm that the "subscribe" box unobtrusively located at the bottom of the page works and makes sure you don't have to depend on catching it on the HN front page. Do note that they seem to remove it at the end of the month! You can still see some of the scans from the last couple months at https://web.archive.org/web/*/scanofthemonth.com https://web.archive.org/web/*/scanofthemonth.com.
- joppy 5y agoThe text dims a bit too fast to read comfortably on my phone (especially since in the latest version of iOS Apple has inexplicably moved the address bar from the top of the screen to the bottom). But this scrolling paradigm is just fantastic for looking through the CT scans on my phone - I can easily move up and down layers. Kudos to the web design.
- notreallyserio 5y agoOff topic but just FYI you can move the address bar back where it belongs in the Settings app.
- paulvandermeijs 5y agoOr by using the settings/text size menu by clicking the icon in the address bar.
- pdpi 5y agoI was seriously weirded out by the bottom address bar when I first got it, but I now prefer it. Reaching for the top of the screen is uncomfortable, and I like how the bottom address bar works as a tab switcher too.
- Hjfrf 5y agoFirefox mobile moved the address bar to the bottom several months ago - it's good to see that being copied elsewhere too. The bar at the top made sense for pc, but it's a clear improvement on mobile.
- Sevaris 5y agoNovel idea but I feel it doesn't go into nearly enough depth or detail.
- louhike 5y agoYes, and it's sad because there's so much to say about the Game Boy and its followers, and I'm not even talking about being more complex, just more information would have been nice. And it might have been better with real pictures of the inside of the consoles, instead of the scans which look cool but add nothing else (it hides more than it shows). Just looking cool might of course be enough as it attracts some people not interested in the subject, so I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just disappointed as someone mildly interested on the subject.
- vinnymac 5y agoI completely agree. I think this would've been more impressive if they left the DSi and Switch out of this. You could dedicate an entire thesis worth of information to the DS section alone. This page should've focused on the Gameboys legacy, but I imagine it was difficult to obtain devices to scan, they likely used what they had on hand, and am glad they did create it. If anyone wants to work together to make scans of more devices, I own a very large number of these handheld devices and would be willing to have them scanned.
- DrBoring 5y agoAround 20 years ago, I disassembled various electronics and scanned them on a flatbed scanner. The scans were 300dpi. Gameboy Color and Gameboy Pocket were among the items I scanned. You can see the scans at https://waltersgameboy.tripod.com/ https://waltersgameboy.tripod.com/ I don't remember why I didn't scan my DMGB. Either I had lost it, or it was too precious to me to risk breaking. As a kid, I bought it with my own money. I was probably 11 years old. edit: I did find my DMGB eventually when I moved out of my family home.
- dehrmann 5y ago> tripod.com Haven't seen that domain in a few decades.
- DrBoring 5y agoI'm surprised that Lycos still keeps it running.
- harha 5y agoWhat's a DMGB?
- DrBoring 5y agoOpps. I spelled it wrong. It's DMG: Dot Matrix Gameboy. It's what the Gameboy enthusiast community calls the original Gameboy. The name comes from the model number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy#Development > The original internal code name for the Game Boy is Dot Matrix Game, referring to its dot-matrix display in contrast to the preceding Game & Watch series (which Yokoi had created in 1980) that has segmented LCDs pre-printed with an overlay, limiting each model to only play one game. The initials DMG came to be featured on the final product's model number: "DMG-01"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whizzter 5y ago