8 ms·

A circuit-level redesign of the Game Boy Advance

241 points by looperhacks 5y ago

georgeecollins 5y ago
This is nice but I always preferred the clam shell GBA. I would like an update of that.
- munificent 5y ago
  That's the GBA SP they refer to in: > Growing up with a GBA SP, I was spoiled by its clicky buttons, rechargeable battery, and illuminated screen. When I finally got my hands on an original GBA, I couldn’t be more disappointed by the stark difference in feel and function. I agree the SP is just a miles better form factor in every way. I sunk hours and hours into playing games on mine.
deergomoo 5y ago
I am endlessly amazed by the community and ingenuity that has sprung up around retro console modding. Replacement screens, shells, buttons, power delivery, even things like optical drive emulators that read from an SD card. The only downside is that systems, Game Boys especially, have shot up in price from people buying them specifically to gut them and do new builds.
- willis936 5y ago
  It's not just gameboys. 3DS are barely discontinued and priced 2x MSRP. Don't look price trends of any console or game made before 2004. The kids have grown and their disposable income can be spent on their old toys. Nintendo has a chance to capitalize hard. They just need to offer a good alternative. They have the benefit of always choosing underpowered hardware because now they should be able to cram all of the native consoles into a single chip for nearly no money. With proper hardware scalers to properly simulate old LCD and CRT displays and they could charge whatever they want and still make a killing. It would just require a bit of engineering effort and, more critically, a willingness to admit the value of old content. Nintendo is a very conservative Japanese company and can not tell them anything.
realslimjd 5y ago
This is incredibly cool.
redundantly 5y ago
That's was a very fun read!
mikepurvis 5y ago
Based on the package markings, it looks like the CPU was actually lifted from a GBA SP PCB. This makes sense, of course, and neatly side-steps a bunch of potential issues around firmware, bringup, etc. I know the author says "the CPU is taken from a GBA SP" in the text, but that could also have meant taken from the design as opposed to the specific physical part having been taken.
- neverendingsigh 5y ago
  As you said, it would be more trouble than it's worth to use, say, an FPGA in place of an original AGB-CPU part. Additionally, our part of the community has an appreciation for the original hardware and components; it's more about being able to rescue parts from damaged PCBs and/or push those original components beyond what Nintendo settled on.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Definitely! Obviously it does increase the complexity of the project for others, knowing that you need a donor system from which to desolder key components. But it's great to end up with a product that's the real system running real cartridges and not a Linux computer running emulation. That said, it's cool that projects like MiSTer exist, and I could imagine that that might be a nice middle-ground for some people— being closer to the real hardware than purely software emulation, but also something that can also be built from scratch with new, off-the-shelf components.
someperson 5y ago
> Non-SP GBA has problems: AA batteries, buttons are mushy, unlit screen, bad power delivery causing noisy audio Impressive project and hacking aside, the the original DS and the DS Lite (which both support GameBoy Advance cartridges) addresses most of these concerns. Do those two systems address the power delivery and noisy audio?
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  I think they do, but they're also a different form factor, and the screen is taller meaning that GBA games end up letterboxed. It's perfectly usable, but I can understand someone wanting to build a device to deliver an optimized "native" GBA experience.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Not to mention that IMO, AA batteries are an asset on vintage portable electronics. The last thing I need is to search for overly expensive, and possibly already dead, battery packs on eBay when mine turns into a spicy pillow. AA batteries are much easier to acquire, and can be rechargeable to reduce environmental impact.
- babypuncher 5y ago
  I actually prefer the AA batteries. I've built several custom Game Boy Advances and Colors. My favorite unit is a GBA I built in an aluminum chassis, which necessitated an upgrade to a built-in rechargeable battery. Being able to top off the battery with a USB-C cable is convenient, but I know the battery will no longer hold a charge in a few years or so and will have to be replaced. I've kept the original battery compartments on all my other Game Boys, because I know rechargeable AAs will be easy to find for the foreseeable future.
  - anamexis 5y ago
    I imagine 18650 cells will also be easy to find for the foreseeable future.
    - 5y ago
OJFord 5y ago
> [Why redesign...] Its screen is unlit. Oh wow, I'd forgotten until now, but I had a plug-in (USB type B I think) LED light on a stiff but flexible cord for my GB Colour. Funny to think about now, reading and typing this on my backlit phone.
- bityard 5y ago
  Back when the GBA was still newish, I bought and installed a front-light kit for mine. After that mod, the display was still utterly terrible and useless for fast-moving games like Sonic and Metroid, but at least you could SEE it. (I still have this GBA and loan it out to my kids on long car drives. It sounds like its tour of duty is coming to an end, however, as my oldest is saving up for a Switch.)
  - coldpie 5y ago
    The Afterburner kit[1]? I installed a small number of those for friends back in high school, was good fun. I remember the scariest moment while working on a friend's device was accidentally ripping off one of the buttons' contact pads while trying to solder onto it, and having to carefully scrape away the paint over a nearby trace to solder onto instead. He never knew :) [1] https://www.gameboy-advance.net/accessories/gba_afterburner_internal_light.htm https://www.gameboy-advance.net/accessories/gba_afterburner_...
- dont__panic 5y ago
  Was it a worm light? https://www.amazon.com/Light-Illumination-Nintendo-Gameboy-Console/dp/B014UAU244 https://www.amazon.com/Light-Illumination-Nintendo-Gameboy-C... Lot of fond memories of that thing. Come to think of it, I'd love something with the same style for a book light...
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Similar - in my memory it has a bit smaller of a head, less lamp shaped, and not coiled. (But possibly I just extended it and used it so much it lost the coil!) This sort of colour, and the translucent GBC case that probably helped me on my way to interest in EE too: https://goldenshop.com.hk/AI-trad/IMAGES/m_wormlight.jpg https://goldenshop.com.hk/AI-trad/IMAGES/m_wormlight.jpg
zokier 5y ago
> FunnyPlaying IPS V2 display How are the colors on this replacement display? With GBA the colors are kinda complicated topic because AGS-101 colors are very different from the original AGS-001, to the point where games can end up looking over-saturated and cartoonish.
- philistine 5y ago
  Yeah, their website is way too light on details. A common problem with GBA replacement screens is the resolution of 160 by 144 leads to rectangular pixels, which is a big no no. I dug around and found a reference to a problem with the screen's buffer causing visual tearing. That screen is a no-go for me. The Analogue Pocket is still the display king.
  - neverendingsigh 5y ago
    The AGB's resolution is 240x160. The panel used is new-old-stock or reproduction equivalent from the BlackBerry Curve 9380: a 480x360 panel, which allows the AGB adapter to output a 2x integer-scaled 480x240 image. When playing a DMG or CGB game, the image is still 2x but otherwise the image and behavior comes from the stock AGB hardware: a default scale places a 160x144 image in the center of the display, and pressing the L and R buttons allow you to toggle between that native mode and a horizontally stretched mode (that basically nobody likes). The tearing existed in the initial version of the adapter ribbon, as the 9380's display driver refreshes the display in portrait rather than the AGB's landscape. The second revision of the adapter, which started shipping only a couple months after the initial, way back in 2019, adds a 1-frame buffer to output the signal in the way that the display driver expects. The AGB's frame rate is a hair under 60Hz, so this does introduce a 16ms delay, but in the vast majority of AGB games this drawback is outweighed by all of the other benefits.
- neverendingsigh 5y ago
  They're more accurate to what we would recognize as the RGB value on a modern device, as opposed to accurate to the classic AGB display—or "over-saturated and cartoonish." Some people like this, others don't. I sense you might know this, but for others' reference, some later AGB games have settings to optimize colors for AGB/AGS-001 or AGS-101 displays. That's sort of the best we have unless new adapters are released that allow for additional configuration, like some of the recent Game Boy Color kits utilizing the BlackBerry Q5 displays. There's another kit released by FunnyPlaying recently that utilizes new old stock of the lower display of the DSi. They perform similarly to the 101 displays, which to your point are still more saturated and RGB-accurate but still not as much as the BlackBerry 9380 displays used in the IPS v2 kit.
poyu 5y ago
No schematics are to be found...
- neverendingsigh 5y ago
  Behavioral standards within the Game Boy modding scene aren't great. Lots of other PCB projects (reverse engineering and original boards alike) have been stolen with credit stripped; novice end users demand Apple-level support for hobbyist projects regardless of what level of support the creator is able to provide, and for these full console PCB projects many people overestimate their ability to perform the necessary soldering (ask me about my OEM AGB firestarter...actually please don't). None of these issues are unique to this scene but it's what we have to deal with. I'm not expressing this so that it can be debated, because I don't represent everyone's thoughts, but there is a fair amount of regular self-critique around these issues and our approaches.
ivraatiems 5y ago
This is so cool, I'd order one if it were ever possible to manufacture them for a reasonable cost. Like many people, the GBA has a special place in my heart - in my case, envy because I wasn't allowed to have one, until I finally got an SP. I wonder how much of this would have been possible (at a higher price point) when the GBA itself was designed. Probably quite a bit, but I bet the cost would have become prohibitive given the market.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tomxor 5y ago
There are 80MB of images on this page, you really need to downsample those JPGs. Even with a large enough downstream, Github is understandably throttling connections.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I'm getting about half that count for the entire page. Doubt Github cares about serving 40 MBs of files over the web, that's what they do. User experience might not be greatest on a slow connection though but then again what are you going to do here if not look at the redesigned electronics in detail anyways. In some ways it's actually somewhat refreshing to be actually served source quality content in such a presentation in the days where aggregated platforms heavily compress things for mass consumption.
neverendingsigh 5y ago
Just yesterday, Zekfoo published his CGZ board project, taking a similar approach to the Game Boy Color's PCB. It's much less involved—the AGZ project is partially about fitting an Advance SP board's features into the classic Advance—but still neat if you're into this kind of thing. https://github.com/Zekfoo/CGZ https://github.com/Zekfoo/CGZ
Zekfoo 5y ago
Very nice to see my work get recognized outside of the Reddit/Discord community. I have to admit, it was weird seeing the traffic for my AGZ repo spike higher than the CGZ repo that I just released. Feel free to ask me any questions about this or the CGZ, I'll answer anything that's not a variation of "will you be releasing/selling it?" :)
- esotericsean 5y ago
  Amazing work my friend. Not to be rude or intentionally ask about what you said not to, but I haven't heard anything about you selling or releasing or anything. Is there an official statement from you about all of that? It's your work so you can do whatever you want with it, I'm just curious.
  - Zekfoo 5y ago
    I suppose if I put the rule out there, it's bound to be broken hah. I have no plans to sell or open-source these two projects. They were passion projects of mine and while I understand everyone and their mothers who've come across them would like to try building them, I made this for myself. The Reddit posts and Github repos are just for me to share my achievements and enjoy the 15 minutes of fame I get among the retro modding community, and hopefully they inspire someone else to make something of their own. I've already had a few run-ins recently with people who can't respect these wishes and feel entitled to get a slice of the pie.
    - adamrmcd 5y ago
      Totally understand. No intention of building, but I am working on a project of a similar scale (very different context) and would be curious if you're available for contract work. (ie, review my work for best practices, etc.) Given no other way to contact you but publicly here, I've posted a FR on Discord, if you are interested :)
- adamrmcd 5y ago
  Had a blast reading through this and your CGZ work. Nice job! Can you post the schematics? I'm really curious on how you changed things (LCD bias, debounce circuit, etc.) Also, can you post a pic of the back with components populated, outside of the case? Thanks!!
cinntaile 5y ago
I mean I get the reasoning to see it as a downside but "It runs on AA batteries" is a feature! Built-in batteries degrade over time and when it's built-in it's usually not possible to switch it out easily by yourself. It's not a problem for this particular problem, I assume it's fairly trivial to replace it but consumer goods companies tend to not care about that at all.
koofdoof 5y ago
Very impressive project, but its always dissapointing to see something closed source. Look but dont touch seems the norm in lots of hobbyist scenes and it always holds back the state of the art. Have to respect the creators wishes though, and I can appreciate not wanting to field tech support questions about this for years.

241 points by looperhacks 5y ago

georgeecollins 5y ago

This is nice but I always preferred the clam shell GBA. I would like an update of that.

munificent 5y ago
That's the GBA SP they refer to in: > Growing up with a GBA SP, I was spoiled by its clicky buttons, rechargeable battery, and illuminated screen. When I finally got my hands on an original GBA, I couldn’t be more disappointed by the stark difference in feel and function. I agree the SP is just a miles better form factor in every way. I sunk hours and hours into playing games on mine.

deergomoo 5y ago

I am endlessly amazed by the community and ingenuity that has sprung up around retro console modding. Replacement screens, shells, buttons, power delivery, even things like optical drive emulators that read from an SD card. The only downside is that systems, Game Boys especially, have shot up in price from people buying them specifically to gut them and do new builds.

willis936 5y ago
It's not just gameboys. 3DS are barely discontinued and priced 2x MSRP. Don't look price trends of any console or game made before 2004. The kids have grown and their disposable income can be spent on their old toys. Nintendo has a chance to capitalize hard. They just need to offer a good alternative. They have the benefit of always choosing underpowered hardware because now they should be able to cram all of the native consoles into a single chip for nearly no money. With proper hardware scalers to properly simulate old LCD and CRT displays and they could charge whatever they want and still make a killing. It would just require a bit of engineering effort and, more critically, a willingness to admit the value of old content. Nintendo is a very conservative Japanese company and can not tell them anything.

realslimjd 5y ago

This is incredibly cool.

redundantly 5y ago

That's was a very fun read!

mikepurvis 5y ago

Based on the package markings, it looks like the CPU was actually lifted from a GBA SP PCB. This makes sense, of course, and neatly side-steps a bunch of potential issues around firmware, bringup, etc. I know the author says "the CPU is taken from a GBA SP" in the text, but that could also have meant taken from the design as opposed to the specific physical part having been taken.

neverendingsigh 5y ago
As you said, it would be more trouble than it's worth to use, say, an FPGA in place of an original AGB-CPU part. Additionally, our part of the community has an appreciation for the original hardware and components; it's more about being able to rescue parts from damaged PCBs and/or push those original components beyond what Nintendo settled on.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Definitely! Obviously it does increase the complexity of the project for others, knowing that you need a donor system from which to desolder key components. But it's great to end up with a product that's the real system running real cartridges and not a Linux computer running emulation. That said, it's cool that projects like MiSTer exist, and I could imagine that that might be a nice middle-ground for some people— being closer to the real hardware than purely software emulation, but also something that can also be built from scratch with new, off-the-shelf components.

someperson 5y ago

> Non-SP GBA has problems: AA batteries, buttons are mushy, unlit screen, bad power delivery causing noisy audio Impressive project and hacking aside, the the original DS and the DS Lite (which both support GameBoy Advance cartridges) addresses most of these concerns. Do those two systems address the power delivery and noisy audio?

mikepurvis 5y ago
I think they do, but they're also a different form factor, and the screen is taller meaning that GBA games end up letterboxed. It's perfectly usable, but I can understand someone wanting to build a device to deliver an optimized "native" GBA experience.
selfhoster11 5y ago
Not to mention that IMO, AA batteries are an asset on vintage portable electronics. The last thing I need is to search for overly expensive, and possibly already dead, battery packs on eBay when mine turns into a spicy pillow. AA batteries are much easier to acquire, and can be rechargeable to reduce environmental impact.
babypuncher 5y ago
I actually prefer the AA batteries. I've built several custom Game Boy Advances and Colors. My favorite unit is a GBA I built in an aluminum chassis, which necessitated an upgrade to a built-in rechargeable battery. Being able to top off the battery with a USB-C cable is convenient, but I know the battery will no longer hold a charge in a few years or so and will have to be replaced. I've kept the original battery compartments on all my other Game Boys, because I know rechargeable AAs will be easy to find for the foreseeable future.
- anamexis 5y ago
  I imagine 18650 cells will also be easy to find for the foreseeable future.
  - 5y ago

OJFord 5y ago

> [Why redesign...] Its screen is unlit. Oh wow, I'd forgotten until now, but I had a plug-in (USB type B I think) LED light on a stiff but flexible cord for my GB Colour. Funny to think about now, reading and typing this on my backlit phone.

bityard 5y ago
Back when the GBA was still newish, I bought and installed a front-light kit for mine. After that mod, the display was still utterly terrible and useless for fast-moving games like Sonic and Metroid, but at least you could SEE it. (I still have this GBA and loan it out to my kids on long car drives. It sounds like its tour of duty is coming to an end, however, as my oldest is saving up for a Switch.)
- coldpie 5y ago
  The Afterburner kit[1]? I installed a small number of those for friends back in high school, was good fun. I remember the scariest moment while working on a friend's device was accidentally ripping off one of the buttons' contact pads while trying to solder onto it, and having to carefully scrape away the paint over a nearby trace to solder onto instead. He never knew :) [1] https://www.gameboy-advance.net/accessories/gba_afterburner_internal_light.htm https://www.gameboy-advance.net/accessories/gba_afterburner_...
dont__panic 5y ago
Was it a worm light? https://www.amazon.com/Light-Illumination-Nintendo-Gameboy-Console/dp/B014UAU244 https://www.amazon.com/Light-Illumination-Nintendo-Gameboy-C... Lot of fond memories of that thing. Come to think of it, I'd love something with the same style for a book light...
- OJFord 5y ago
  Similar - in my memory it has a bit smaller of a head, less lamp shaped, and not coiled. (But possibly I just extended it and used it so much it lost the coil!) This sort of colour, and the translucent GBC case that probably helped me on my way to interest in EE too: https://goldenshop.com.hk/AI-trad/IMAGES/m_wormlight.jpg https://goldenshop.com.hk/AI-trad/IMAGES/m_wormlight.jpg

zokier 5y ago

> FunnyPlaying IPS V2 display How are the colors on this replacement display? With GBA the colors are kinda complicated topic because AGS-101 colors are very different from the original AGS-001, to the point where games can end up looking over-saturated and cartoonish.

philistine 5y ago
Yeah, their website is way too light on details. A common problem with GBA replacement screens is the resolution of 160 by 144 leads to rectangular pixels, which is a big no no. I dug around and found a reference to a problem with the screen's buffer causing visual tearing. That screen is a no-go for me. The Analogue Pocket is still the display king.
- neverendingsigh 5y ago
  The AGB's resolution is 240x160. The panel used is new-old-stock or reproduction equivalent from the BlackBerry Curve 9380: a 480x360 panel, which allows the AGB adapter to output a 2x integer-scaled 480x240 image. When playing a DMG or CGB game, the image is still 2x but otherwise the image and behavior comes from the stock AGB hardware: a default scale places a 160x144 image in the center of the display, and pressing the L and R buttons allow you to toggle between that native mode and a horizontally stretched mode (that basically nobody likes). The tearing existed in the initial version of the adapter ribbon, as the 9380's display driver refreshes the display in portrait rather than the AGB's landscape. The second revision of the adapter, which started shipping only a couple months after the initial, way back in 2019, adds a 1-frame buffer to output the signal in the way that the display driver expects. The AGB's frame rate is a hair under 60Hz, so this does introduce a 16ms delay, but in the vast majority of AGB games this drawback is outweighed by all of the other benefits.
neverendingsigh 5y ago
They're more accurate to what we would recognize as the RGB value on a modern device, as opposed to accurate to the classic AGB display—or "over-saturated and cartoonish." Some people like this, others don't. I sense you might know this, but for others' reference, some later AGB games have settings to optimize colors for AGB/AGS-001 or AGS-101 displays. That's sort of the best we have unless new adapters are released that allow for additional configuration, like some of the recent Game Boy Color kits utilizing the BlackBerry Q5 displays. There's another kit released by FunnyPlaying recently that utilizes new old stock of the lower display of the DSi. They perform similarly to the 101 displays, which to your point are still more saturated and RGB-accurate but still not as much as the BlackBerry 9380 displays used in the IPS v2 kit.

poyu 5y ago

No schematics are to be found...

neverendingsigh 5y ago
Behavioral standards within the Game Boy modding scene aren't great. Lots of other PCB projects (reverse engineering and original boards alike) have been stolen with credit stripped; novice end users demand Apple-level support for hobbyist projects regardless of what level of support the creator is able to provide, and for these full console PCB projects many people overestimate their ability to perform the necessary soldering (ask me about my OEM AGB firestarter...actually please don't). None of these issues are unique to this scene but it's what we have to deal with. I'm not expressing this so that it can be debated, because I don't represent everyone's thoughts, but there is a fair amount of regular self-critique around these issues and our approaches.

ivraatiems 5y ago

This is so cool, I'd order one if it were ever possible to manufacture them for a reasonable cost. Like many people, the GBA has a special place in my heart - in my case, envy because I wasn't allowed to have one, until I finally got an SP. I wonder how much of this would have been possible (at a higher price point) when the GBA itself was designed. Probably quite a bit, but I bet the cost would have become prohibitive given the market.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tomxor 5y ago

There are 80MB of images on this page, you really need to downsample those JPGs. Even with a large enough downstream, Github is understandably throttling connections.

zamadatix 5y ago
I'm getting about half that count for the entire page. Doubt Github cares about serving 40 MBs of files over the web, that's what they do. User experience might not be greatest on a slow connection though but then again what are you going to do here if not look at the redesigned electronics in detail anyways. In some ways it's actually somewhat refreshing to be actually served source quality content in such a presentation in the days where aggregated platforms heavily compress things for mass consumption.

neverendingsigh 5y ago

Just yesterday, Zekfoo published his CGZ board project, taking a similar approach to the Game Boy Color's PCB. It's much less involved—the AGZ project is partially about fitting an Advance SP board's features into the classic Advance—but still neat if you're into this kind of thing. https://github.com/Zekfoo/CGZ https://github.com/Zekfoo/CGZ

Zekfoo 5y ago

Very nice to see my work get recognized outside of the Reddit/Discord community. I have to admit, it was weird seeing the traffic for my AGZ repo spike higher than the CGZ repo that I just released. Feel free to ask me any questions about this or the CGZ, I'll answer anything that's not a variation of "will you be releasing/selling it?" :)

esotericsean 5y ago
Amazing work my friend. Not to be rude or intentionally ask about what you said not to, but I haven't heard anything about you selling or releasing or anything. Is there an official statement from you about all of that? It's your work so you can do whatever you want with it, I'm just curious.
- Zekfoo 5y ago
  I suppose if I put the rule out there, it's bound to be broken hah. I have no plans to sell or open-source these two projects. They were passion projects of mine and while I understand everyone and their mothers who've come across them would like to try building them, I made this for myself. The Reddit posts and Github repos are just for me to share my achievements and enjoy the 15 minutes of fame I get among the retro modding community, and hopefully they inspire someone else to make something of their own. I've already had a few run-ins recently with people who can't respect these wishes and feel entitled to get a slice of the pie.
  - adamrmcd 5y ago
    Totally understand. No intention of building, but I am working on a project of a similar scale (very different context) and would be curious if you're available for contract work. (ie, review my work for best practices, etc.) Given no other way to contact you but publicly here, I've posted a FR on Discord, if you are interested :)
adamrmcd 5y ago
Had a blast reading through this and your CGZ work. Nice job! Can you post the schematics? I'm really curious on how you changed things (LCD bias, debounce circuit, etc.) Also, can you post a pic of the back with components populated, outside of the case? Thanks!!

cinntaile 5y ago

I mean I get the reasoning to see it as a downside but "It runs on AA batteries" is a feature! Built-in batteries degrade over time and when it's built-in it's usually not possible to switch it out easily by yourself. It's not a problem for this particular problem, I assume it's fairly trivial to replace it but consumer goods companies tend to not care about that at all.

koofdoof 5y ago

Very impressive project, but its always dissapointing to see something closed source. Look but dont touch seems the norm in lots of hobbyist scenes and it always holds back the state of the art. Have to respect the creators wishes though, and I can appreciate not wanting to field tech support questions about this for years.