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Game Boy / Color Architecture
- Dwedit 3y agoWhoops, I see Game Boy Color was added in there, but he forgot to revise the part about the cartridge size being only 1MB. Some GBC games reach 4MB in size. edit: There's also an 8MB game about Trains, with some short videos and hi-color images in there.
- monocasa 3y agoAnd to be fair, I don't think there was anything stopping a DMG game from reaching 4MB. The pak has the same aperture size of basically 32k either way, and the bank switching for either 4MB or 1MB is on the cart itself.
- MBCook 3y agoRight. I don’t think Nintendo had a mapper to do it at the time. I doubt third parties did. But if you wanted to let a DMG address 2 gigs of memory 32k at a time you could do it. It’s a little hard to imagine a game needing > 1MB if it’s just B&W. But I suppose you could put a ton of text in or do some kind of demo-scene style ‘video’ playback. But no one would have for cost reasons back then.
- duskwuff 3y ago> But no one would have for cost reasons back then. Not on the GBC, but GBA had a number of video cartridges, including several full-length movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_Video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy_Advance_Video
- MBCook 3y agoI never used one, but I remember being really surprised the first time I saw one of those in a store.
- itsmartapuntocm 3y agoI had a few. The quality was about what you’d expect for a video on a game boy cartridge.
- tadfisher 3y agoI know of the GBC port of Cannon Fodder, which was 32Mb (4MiB) and had an FMV intro. https://youtu.be/DkpQrnKcgp4 https://youtu.be/DkpQrnKcgp4
- Dylan16807 3y agoA single fullscreen image for game boy is almost 6KB. If you were making something pretty you could have several images per level and go over a megabyte without much effort.
- MBCook 3y agoYou can’t individually address every pixel, you have to use tiles. So unless you’re using a mapper chip that could swap them out on a per scan line basis you have much stricter limits.
- Dylan16807 3y agoYes you have to use tiles, but I'm not sure what you mean by "much stricter limits". The game boy can load 384 tiles at once, which is enough to cover the entire screen without duplicates. You can't freely mix the first 128 with the last 128 but that's easy to deal with.
- lynguist 3y agoThat would be levels and levels of indirection because 32K can be loaded at once and to address 2G in 32K chunks you need over 32K just for the address of the block. And then you need a part of the code loaded that actually does that swapping. You would need at least 3 levels for every memory address. Each 32K chunk would have its own address that would be loaded from two 32K chunks, that’s how giant its address is. And then that block would be loaded in. I think that it would be literally impossible to have random access memory of 2G.
- torgoguys 3y agoI'm not sure what you mean. 4gb is 31-bits (<4 bytes) of address space. If each page had 32K of address space (15 bits), that would require 64K different pages, which just requires the remaining 16 bits of the 31 bits to identify it. So the block address is just 2 bytes long, not 32K bytes. For these paged systems, you typically swap in the the page you're interested (iirc, gameboy did it by writing the page number to particular memory addresses) and then work with it for a while, and often execute code directly contained in it, which will eventually lead to loading the next page you need when you need it.
- Dwedit 3y agoNone of the standard mappers used in Game Boy/Game Boy Color games provide 32K switchable banks. They all provide a fixed 16K bank at the beginning, and a switchable 16K bank afterwards. If there are 8 bits of bank selection, the maximum cartridge size becomes 4MB, but some mappers allow more than 8 bits to select a bank. One of the common mappers even enforces that you may not pick bank 0 for the switchable bank, picking 1 instead. Mappers found in bootleg multicarts do allow you to change the base address and size of the game, which will move the fixed bank.
- flipacholas 3y agoWhoops indeed. I’ve just added the new info, thanks!
- qingcharles 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777017
- qingcharles 3y agoYes, 電車でGO!2 高速編 aka Densha de Go! 2 Kōsoku-hen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S62dSVmLPU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S62dSVmLPU0
- ladyanita22 3y agoThis game is technically impressive consdiering it was running in a Z80 basically
- Izmaki 3y agoThank you for using the Pokémon audio as demonstration. Was a nice trip down memory lane... :)
- tetrisgm 3y agoWhat's absolutely brilliant about the development of the original Game Boy is that at the time, Gunpei Yokoi's team was facing significant incredulity. "Why play games when you're on the bus, or on the toilet? It's going to be so uncomfortable. Play at home on you couch in front of the TV with family and friends. Play at the arcade for cutting edge experience. Nobody wants to change batteries and see just a few shades of grey". Their vision was to take "withered technology" and package it in a simple to use device, with simple, short games. That team single handedly started mobile gaming. Much respect to everyone on it.
- louthy 3y agoGame & Watch was first, still Gunpei Yokoi, but yeah I’d consider that the start of mobile gaming - at least that’s my memory!
- chrisco255 3y agoYeah Game & Watches predate Game Boy by quite a bit. And they were quite successful.
- MBCook 3y agoThere’s a reason it was the DMG. Dot Matrix Game(?). It was the first really successful portable system with interchangeable games and a dot matrix screen as opposed to custom LCDs per game like G&W. The Milton Bradley MicroVision came first around 1980. Nintendo referenced it as a precursor. But the screen was 16x16 pixels so ‘graphics’ is kind of misnomer. I think I remember seeing something once where the screen was included with the game, because it was a static LCD sort of like a Game and Watch game. The GB was in the right place, at the right time, from the right company, with the right hardware and software, at the right price point. Instant success.
- tetrisgm 3y agoSame inventor indeed. However the games were mostly just one per device, and basically all used simple "sprites" that toggled on/off. I think the Game & Watch gameplay feels a lot closer to an electronic toy from the early 80s than what people would consider console gaming. Not to detract from its merit. It's just that the Game Boy wasich closer to a NES-like experience.
- Mtinie 3y agoAs an aside, are we at a point in democratized hardware where I could buy the right components and a traced PCB to recreate a Gameboy?
- Waterluvian 3y agoI think you’d at best be buying parts taken from old Game Boys and putting one back together. I think I’ve seen an FPGA Game Boy implementation somewhere, which may be the closest you’d get.
- fathyb 3y agoIf you don't mind your GameBoy being as fast as a supercomputer when it came out, then I think you could get an ARM SBC running a GameBoy emulator on Linux rendering into an OLED screen for less than $150 and a bit of your sanity. If you're looking for hardware fidelity, I don't think it'd be in the "democratised" price range if you want to build a single unit that fits in a handheld form factor.
- TechSquidTV 3y agoThe approach now would be to use an FPGA. See Analogue Pocket, but other kits exist.
- lancefisher 3y agoSome people have done this, but you need to transplant at least the CPU from an original. Those chips weren’t built for anyone else. https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/s/FEAH2VhBRT https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/s/FEAH2VhBRT FunnyPlaying recently came out with an FPGA-based version for an affordable price. https://funnyplaying.com/products/fpgbc-kit?variant=40858870284349 https://funnyplaying.com/products/fpgbc-kit?variant=40858870... They also have a new, populated motherboard for the Game Boy Advance, into which you have to transplant the CPU and RAM.
- bbbbbr 3y agoThere is a variation on the new-pcb and components approach called the "Ultra Boy Colour" which doesn't require any parts from an OEM Game Boy Color. It can use a clone CPU that was manufactured (until recently?) for the "GBBoy Colour" (and could also be pulled from the sort of failed SGB-like clone called the "Extension Converter for GB"). > I redesigned the Gameboy Color from the ground up > based on the premise that it wouldn't require any > components to be harvested from a real GBC, so it > would be compatible with both the original GBC and > clone hardware taken from a GB Boy Colour- since > the KF2007 clone CPU from the GBBC is practically > a drop-in replacement for the CGB CPU found in a > real GBC- no software compatibility issues at all. https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/w0wrt5/no_this_isnt_a_gb_boy_colour_its_a_totally/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/w0wrt5/no_this_isn...
- christkv 3y agoThere is a whole book dedicated to the game boy by Florent Gorges but sadly I don’t think its translated into english. I got them in Spanish. Unique interviews of the creators. https://www.amazon.es/Historia-Nintendo-Vol-4-1989-1999-INCRE%C3%8DBLE/dp/8417649735/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?crid=145ACQIUZAJU1&keywords=florent+gorges+nintendo&qid=1703675045&sprefix=florent+gorges+nintendo%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-6 https://www.amazon.es/Historia-Nintendo-Vol-4-1989-1999-INCR...
- sunpazed 3y agoThe Game Boy is by far my most favourite console of all time. I’m currently writing a game for it in ASM (a pinball-dungeon crawler). The hardware is simple to understand, and the restrictions require you to be creative.
- autotune 3y agoWhat are you going to do by learning how Game Boy architecture works, hack the planet?