Dmg Gameboy Xlr Output Mod
Here’s a pretty cool mod that brings your good old DMG-01 brick GameBoy into the 21st century and adds modern HDMI to it. A company called Current Cake is working on the mod, which is simply a circuit board that sandwiches itself between the front and back half the GameBoy. Game Boy – The original, iconic handheld from Nintendo required 4 AA batteries and had a green, monochrome screen.There is an excellent bi-verted backlight mod available for it that really brings out the sharpness of the screen and (in my personal opinion) makes playing on the original handheld much more enjoyable.
What I did is design a set of custom PCBs to replace the original GB PCBs and clean up the project significantly. Even though i was capable of designing the battery charger and audio amp circuits myself, I took the lazy route and leveraged some readily available designs from Adafruit and copied the Layout and schematics into my project.
Specs,
Original Game Boy DMG-01 Case.
Custom Main PCB
Custom Cart PCB
Custom Button PCB with extra X - Y buttons.
Adafruit 3.2' SPI TFT screen
Mono 2.5W amplifier Circuit
2000mA hour LiPo Battery
Battery Charger circuit
Main PCB
Holds the Pi Zero in a cut out in the middle of the board. Bridges the Connections over to the Cart header for the Mircro SD card. Also bridges the required pins from the GPIO to the screen header. Has Micro USB port for charging. Has USB-A port for external devices. Holds the battery charger circuit and audio amp circuit. I will be using the basic PWM out gpio pin for audio. the audio on these games are pretty crude anyways. The battery connector sticks through one of the openings in the battery compartment with some modification to the opening. I decided not to try to bring out the HDMI port as it would have been very complicated and using a SPI screen the output of the HDMI is the same very low resolution of the built in screen. I am also using the extra GPIO pins for the buttons instead of using a USB device like the teensy. this eliminates the need for a USB hub if you want a USB port on the outside.
Cart PCB
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replaces the cart board with a custom board that holds the Micro SD card. Replaces the card edge connector with a female 0.1 pin header. I will post pictures of the board layout software, but the actual implementation will become more clear once I have the boards on monday.Dmg Gameboy Xlr Output Mod 1
Button PCBThere were existing options for the DMG-01, but they only had A and B buttons, I used the super game girl board at first for prototyping, but it wasnt really designed for the DMG GB even though it was based on the original 2 button PCB--ABXY button pads didn't line up. I decided to make my own board specifically for the DMG GB with the extra X and Y buttons. I am selling the extra boards on Ebay. I received them today and have pictures.
Pictures and video.
Video of GPIO mapped buttons and Adafruit screen working in Prototype form.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM_RlXi .. e=youtu.be
Main board and Cart board Panelized (Layout Software screen shot)
Button Board PCB
So you just installed a backlight to your GB Pocket and didn't destroy the LCD in the process? Congratulations! Your gameboy now has very short battery life, poor to no compatibility with flash carts, wild contrast variations in game, random losses of saved games.
Dmg Gameboy Xlr Output Mod Free
And the Everdrive/EMS/Derp/Smartboy/Elcheapo cart you just spent good money on doesn't work on your modded pocket? But *RandomUser* from reddit said his works perfectly!
Here's what you need to know, needed to know, and how to fix what could have been a very expensive learning experience!
Metal download mac. Using Unreal 4 on OS X is painfully slow — so slow I've considered buying a Mac Pro to compensate for the performance lag.But if Metal is really as fast as it seems, I'm hoping I won't have to. It's good for the game-makersAfter Adobe's spotty track record with Flash, it's easy to be suspicious at the company's ability to produce applications optimized for Apple's hardware. But when the company stopped by Apple's State of the Union presentation to show off how Metal has improved both After Effects and Illustrator, I was really impressed: After Effects rendering in particular showed a drastic improvement. Only Apple can do this, in part because — compared to the competition — the company has a much more limited set of hardware than Android or Microsoft.During Monday's keynote, Apple showed operations in the Unreal editor that would have slowed my Retina MacBook Pro to a crawl.
Gameboys, Flash Carts and backlights have all been designed to operate at 5volts. The Pocket operates from 2 AAA batteries supplying anywhere from 3.2volts to 1.5v at the end of the batteries life.
A small circuit called a flyback converter is responsible for boosting the constantly varying battery voltage to a rock steady 5v for the CPU and cart, and -19volts for the LCD to make the pixels do their thing.
When you design a circuit like this, you must know the expected maximum and minimum current of the load. You then choose the inductor, the switching components, diodes and capacitance to give a satisfactory output with little ripple for the specified load.
15yrs later and along comes backlights and Flash carts. A typical flash cart will consume as much as the entire GB, more during flashing from an SD card. Backlights on average draw 15-50ma, this too is about 50% of the GB's consumption, and in conjunction will exceed the design specifications of the original converter.
So what do you do? You install a supplementary converter to generate a steady 5v from the battery supply. Is this hard? No. Here's how:
Above is an unmodified pocket running my V1.9 ElCheapoSD flash cart (not the low power mod version) These batteries are about 50% used, the 5V system voltage is now at 5.0volts, contrast is stable. During Flashing the contrast will flicker because of the high current draw. As the batteries get more depleted the contrast will vary more, the CPU will reset when you attempt to flash a game. Now lets add a backlight:
Excuse the 3' LCD, it is just being used as a backlight load on the system. The 5v has now dropped to 3.8volts. The contrast is adjusted to maximum for the image to be visible. The power supply is getting warm. Flashing drops the voltage to 3.7volts and after a few seconds the CPU resets and the image is no longer visible. It is important to note here that at 3.7volts, the cartridge is now using it's internal save battery to power the SRAM, at this rate the cell will last around 90minutes before it is completely flat, you save is lost forever and the battery will need replacing.
How do we fix this? We install the new converter.
This is a modified 101 backlight driver module from my store. The cutoff voltage for this module is 1.8volts which means it'll put out a steady 5volts all the way down to 1.8volts battery voltage. This is not ideal as NiMh cells will still have quite a bit of charge in them even beyond this point. THIS is what I'd recommend. I haven't tried this but according to the specs, it is what you want! It'll run until your batteries are completely discharged.
Depending on its output voltage, you may or may not need to cut the original 5v pin from the regulator to keep the LCD voltage alive. The first person to mod their pocket with the pololu module I'm sure will let me know.
With the module fitted, the system is at a steady 5v. There is zero contrast fluctuation with almost any flash cart. No random resets, no save game loss. You'll still only get 60-90minutes out of a fresh set of batteries but this can't be helped. There just isn't that much energy in a set of AAA batteries.
If you found this useful, head over to my FB page and leave a comment. I'll be making a few more of these about various GB subjects including backligting a DMG earlier than Rev 07, Backlighting a GB Color etc..