There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge • Hacker News Board

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#41

Post by GhettoComputers » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #22

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have protocol offload engines on modern NICs, what's wrong with basically a "Wifi Offload Engine"? > 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 render…

And that's the point of these esp modules in the first place. They were originally intended as sdio wifi modules to give plug and play wifi support to various embedded systems.

From what I know, they were not for embedded systems, they were the embedded systems. They are just powerful arduino with wifi.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#42

Post by phendrenad2 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

This has been done before: https://hackaday.io/project/20769-wifi-game-boy-cartridge

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#43

Post by toast0 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #38

toast0 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be pedantic, the Famicom had audio bypass, but the NES really didn't (unless you hack around with the expansion connector, which wasn't used for anything Nintendo approved in the US)

Oh they removed it for the NES ? I thought it was unaltered. Good pedantism btw :)

Yeah, the cartridge pinout is slightly different. The famicom has a 60 pin connector and the NES has a 72 pin connector, but ten pins go to the expansion port and four pins are used for the license chip, so two pins were lost, and those two pins were the audio out/in. Castlevania (and some other games) has significantly different audio for Japan vs the rest of the world.

There's a few different ways that people modify their NES if they want to use cartridges with audio hardware, using the (otherwise unused) expansion port pins.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#44

Post by bityard » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #29

umvi wrote: post #12

It 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…

Not to beat a dead horse here, but everything cartridge based games did was “cheating” by your standard Anyone remember Mode 7 style of rendering?

Mode 7 wasn't a cartridge feature, it was a background layer that could be rotated and scaled in the SNES hardware. You may be thinking of the FX chip (mentioned by others in this thread).

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#45

Post by phendrenad2 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:56 PM UTC

Reminds me of the Gameboy Floppy Disk Drive or the Gameboy CD-ROM Drive:

https://hxc2001-free-fr.translate.goog/gbdk/?_x_tr_sch=http&...

http://hackedgadgets.com/2006/03/19/gameboy-atapi-cd-player/

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#46

Post by monocasa » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #41

monocasa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's the point of these esp modules in the first place. They were originally intended as sdio wifi modules to give plug and play wifi support to various embedded systems.

From what I know, they were not for embedded systems, they were the embedded systems. They are just powerful arduino with wifi.

The programmablity wasn't the initial selling point. They were very much designed originally to be a shrink wrap addon to another embedded system.

Most little single purpose ucontroller based products not made by Broadcom have an SDK for writing code for the device too, it just normally doesn't go anywhere. Espressif just sort of won the lottery and an ecosystem formed around them, but that wasn't their initial market as it would be foolish to bet the company on that.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#47

Post by fredoralive » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #29

umvi wrote: post #12

It 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…

Not to beat a dead horse here, but everything cartridge based games did was “cheating” by your standard Anyone remember Mode 7 style of rendering?

Mode 7 is a feature of the SNES's basic video hardware, not a cartridge add on.

Most cartridges are just ROM, perhaps some battery backed RAM, and if needed some bank switching / address decoding logic to glue things together. Nothing particularly smart. Certainly no extra processors running the show. All the smarts was in the console.

There are exceptions, like the SNES games with coprocessors, but not all of them are full CPUs, and even then there are 1500+ SNES titles in total, and less than 100 with extra chips in them[1]. The mapper chips in NES games often did a bit more than just bank switching, but they weren't in control either.

Cue someone mentioning the MB Microvision...

[1] Based on Wikipedia, and I hope I roughly counted the number of entries in the coprocessor game table correctly.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#48

Post by bityard » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

GhettoComputers wrote: post #41

monocasa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's the point of these esp modules in the first place. They were originally intended as sdio wifi modules to give plug and play wifi support to various embedded systems.

From what I know, they were not for embedded systems, they were the embedded systems. They are just powerful arduino with wifi.

The first esp modules were originally marketed and sold as simple serial ttl-to-wifi bridges, but it didn't take hardware hackers long to discover they were hiding a lot functionality underneath. It took some doing but eventually espressif opened up their toolchain and _that's_ when they became "powerful adruino with wifi."

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#49

Post by sdenton4 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 8:03 PM UTC

jgwil2 wrote: post #33

sdenton4 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to super-upvote: the reverse emulation video is my second favorite tech demo of all time. It is fantastic.

What's your favorite?

Monty Montgomery on analog-digital conversion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#50

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 8:04 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #43

agumonkey wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh they removed it for the NES ? I thought it was unaltered. Good pedantism btw :)

Yeah, the cartridge pinout is slightly different. The famicom has a 60 pin connector and the NES has a 72 pin connector, but ten pins go to the expansion port and four pins are used for the license chip, so two pins were lost, and those two pins were the audio out/in. Castlevania (and some other games) has significantly different audio for Japan vs the rest of the world. There's a few different ways that people modif…

Yeah I've seen some youtube vid about famicon audio chips and it was insanely high fidelity for a tiny video game console. Must be weird to play such games as a kid back in the days.