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I'm kind of shocked the physical tooling exists to make a Game Boy cartridge and chips more than anything else.
by xxpor 3y ago
I'm kind of shocked the physical tooling exists to make a Game Boy cartridge and chips more than anything else.
- hbn 3y agoThey didn't actually do that, it seems to just be a ROM release. Though they could have. Limited Run Games does Gameboy cartridges. I'm not sure what kind of tooling they use for it though.
- chrisco255 3y agoYou can buy flashable game boy cartridges on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gameboy-flash-cartridge/s?k=gameboy+flash+cartridge https://www.amazon.com/gameboy-flash-cartridge/s?k=gameboy+f...
- reaperducer 3y agoI'm kind of shocked the physical tooling exists to make a Game Boy cartridge and chips more than anything else. You can get brand new Atari 2600 cartridges in boxes and everything. Though, I think the shells are actually scavenged from old games.
- ryanmercer 3y ago>You can get brand new Atari 2600 cartridges in boxes and everything. Yup, new titles still being made. There's even Halo for the 2600. Tons of titles currently being manufactured for a lot of vintage consoles/computers: https://atariage.com/store/ https://atariage.com/store/
- RobotToaster 3y agoThe cartridges were mostly just a rom chip on a PCB. Some had RAM and/or a simple bank controller.
- retrac 3y agoFor the Atari 2600, Game Boy, etc., the first cartridges were nothing more than a ROM chip on a printed circuit board. Later games sometimes included a lot more functionality on the cartridge (battery-backed save RAM, bank switching hardware, etc.) which does make things complicated very quickly. Today, programmable logic is sometimes used to replace old custom IC designs used in cartridges, or to design something new. For games more complicated than a simple ROM chip, the Game Boy presents an interesting challenge: the cartridge is both very small and it needs to be able to run off battery power. That excludes using both a high-power-consumption modern SoC or FPGA, or using lots of discrete logic. But if it'll fit in 32 KB, it's 3D print a case, order a PCB, and program a standard Flash chip.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago> For the Atari 2600, Game Boy, etc., the first cartridges were nothing more than a ROM chip on a printed circuit board. We've actually come full circle on this one. If you ever disassemble a Nintendo Switch Game Card that has a black area above the metal contacts, it doesn't even have a PCB. It's just a ROM chip, with metal contacts on the bottom shaped differently than your standard BGA pattern, contained in plastic. If it has a green area above the metal contacts, it's a PCB with the chip on the other side.
- cubefox 3y agoWhat functionality does the PCB add?
- bityard 3y agoIt's pretty trivial for a company to make a mold for a plastic cartridge. The chips are nothing special, they are just ROMs. Cheap and widely available. In fact, I'm pretty confident that a competent DIYer could 3D print a cartridge shell, flash a ROM, and etch a PCB in an afternoon or two.