There are some similar efforts to add WiFi to old 8-bit computers.
The TRS-IO is pretty neat. It bridges the wifi to an IO bus, and provides both a "retro app store" program and a way to make samba shares look like local drives.
There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
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Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#12It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. At what point are you basically just using the game boy's screen connected to a much more powerful external computer? It would be like me creating a new "SNES game" with a raspberry pi stuffed inside the cartridge with GPIOs mapped to the SNES cartridge interface and saying "there oughta be a full 3d SNES game" but at that point the SNES is doing very little processing compared to the pi's SoC which is doing 100% of the 3d rendering.
All that said, this project is still pretty sweet and I enjoyed the writeup.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#13It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. At what point are you basically just using the game boy's screen connected to a much more powerful external computer? It would be like me creating a new "SNES game" with a raspberry pi stuffed inside the cartridge with GPIOs mapped to the SNES cartridge interface and saying "there oughta be a full 3d SNE…
Well, that's been done also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0
Also, commercial 3D SNES games sometimes had to bring their own coprocessors, so it's fully in line with tradition:
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#14It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. At what point are you basically just using the game boy's screen connected to a much more powerful external computer? It would be like me creating a new "SNES game" with a raspberry pi stuffed inside the cartridge with GPIOs mapped to the SNES cartridge interface and saying "there oughta be a full 3d SNE…
Isn't that basically what modern computers do anyway? There is so much processing done outside the CPU. Graphics, network, security, etc
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#15Amazing project and cool blog! What a great domain name, too. Thanks for sharing!
Indeed the entire URL is quite well done.
https://there.oughta.be/a/wifi-game-boy-cartridge
It would be neat (and terrible) if suggestions could be submitted through error handling.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#16It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. At what point are you basically just using the game boy's screen connected to a much more powerful external computer? It would be like me creating a new "SNES game" with a raspberry pi stuffed inside the cartridge with GPIOs mapped to the SNES cartridge interface and saying "there oughta be a full 3d SNE…
Isn't that how the SNES enhancement chips that allowed for 3D games like Star Fox worked?
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#17It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. At what point are you basically just using the game boy's screen connected to a much more powerful external computer? It would be like me creating a new "SNES game" with a raspberry pi stuffed inside the cartridge with GPIOs mapped to the SNES cartridge interface and saying "there oughta be a full 3d SNE…
I get what you're saying, but it's worth also mentioning that your full 3d SNES game example is pretty much exactly what games like Star Fox[0] did, back in the early 90's. The Super FX chip is inside the SNES cartridge. From the wikipedia page:
> The Super FX was so much more powerful than the SNES's standard processor that the development team joked that the SNES was just a box to hold the chip.
Really interesting to read about, but there was a whole selection of other chips that various SNES games took advantage of: [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_(1993_video_game)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#18It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. At what point are you basically just using the game boy's screen connected to a much more powerful external computer? It would be like me creating a new "SNES game" with a raspberry pi stuffed inside the cartridge with GPIOs mapped to the SNES cartridge interface and saying "there oughta be a full 3d SNE…
The SNES example may be working against you here, since there were lots of commercially-released SNES games that included coprocessors in the cartridge to do heavy lifting the console wasn't otherwise capable of. At least one of those games actually used an ARM processor in the cartridge.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#19It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. At what point are you basically just using the game boy's screen connected to a much more powerful external computer? It would be like me creating a new "SNES game" with a raspberry pi stuffed inside the cartridge with GPIOs mapped to the SNES cartridge interface and saying "there oughta be a full 3d SNE…
Well, that's been done also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0 Also, commercial 3D SNES games sometimes had to bring their own coprocessors, so it's fully in line with tradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX
Just to super-upvote: the reverse emulation video is my second favorite tech demo of all time. It is fantastic.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#20It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. At what point are you basically just using the game boy's screen connected to a much more powerful external computer? It would be like me creating a new "SNES game" with a raspberry pi stuffed inside the cartridge with GPIOs mapped to the SNES cartridge interface and saying "there oughta be a full 3d SNE…
Many people here are mentioning the SNES, but actually, outside of classic SNES games like Star Fox, Stunt Race FX, and Yoshi's Island using co-processor chips, SEGA also produced what they called the SVP chip for Virtua Racing on the Genesis.
Then we got the SEGA 32x - which was literally dumping a giant chain of extra chips onto the Genesis in order to do things like primitive 3D and scaling.
Beyond the SNES as well, the NES also had a habit of packing in small bits of extra hardware on their carts.