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There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

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Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#61

Post by monocasa »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #57
monocasa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use cases where they are the only processor (and thus necessitate use case specific programmablity like you're saying) came later. That wasn't the intially planned market.

It came before they were hackable. I have been following it for years. It was fun seeing cheap Chinese smart devices being exposed and each WiFi enabled one would have an ESP8266 and only it aside from some SMD capacitors and resistors. I’m not saying they were sold as hackable. I’m saying they were deciphered easily as the only microcontroller required for the smart devices.

I'm including Chinese system integrators here, they just figured out that these devices were hackable prior to the western maker community. I have it under good authority that those weren't espressif's original target market either.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#63

Post by bgro »

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…

It seems like everyone in tech does this. Someone has a mind blowing feat of engineering, but leave out the part where they cheated and arguably lied about it because "it's just some minor detail that doesn't really matter"... For some reason they think these are bragging points that put them above all other engineers.

"I built a calculator completely from scratch by myself with no help" (by importing calculator.*)

"I invented my own cloud microservice in a language I wrote completely myself" (It's hello world split in 2 files on google drive and the language is just JavaScript but it you added a "framework" (it's single method) that already exists in the wild but your version is slower and worse)

"I built my own computer" (by buying a prebuilt computer but swapping out the ram, or buying an essentially prebuilt computer but it comes disassembled)

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#64

Post by GhettoComputers »

monocasa wrote: post #61
GhettoComputers wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It came before they were hackable. I have been following it for years. It was fun seeing cheap Chinese smart devices being exposed and each WiFi enabled one would have an ESP8266 and only it aside from some SMD capacitors and resistors. I’m not saying they were sold as hackable. I’m saying they were deciphered easily as the only microcontroller required for the smart devices.

I'm including Chinese system integrators here, they just figured out that these devices were hackable prior to the western maker community. I have it under good authority that those weren't espressif's original target market either.

Not surprised, there’s some very capable chips that aren’t fully utilized, I think a lot of smart watches have a certain Nordic chip too. Know of any more ESP like chips?

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#66

Post by GhettoComputers »

bgro wrote: post #63
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…

It seems like everyone in tech does this. Someone has a mind blowing feat of engineering, but leave out the part where they cheated and arguably lied about it because "it's just some minor detail that doesn't really matter"... For some reason they think these are bragging points that put them above all other engineers. "I built a calculator completely from scratch by myself with no help" (by importing calculator.*) "…

Everyone lies and overstates achievements online.

I’m a billionaire with 22in, my dinner with Bezos went well, I had to ignore 22 messages from hot models wanting to fuck to post this, I could have been working for 12k an hour but I decided your post was worth replying to even though satellite Internet costs on my huge yacht costs a lot more than you make in a day.

I’m going to fly on my private jet now, feel free to contact me about how you can invest and fall for my crypto margin trading that ends badly for you.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#67

Post by monocasa »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #64
monocasa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm including Chinese system integrators here, they just figured out that these devices were hackable prior to the western maker community. I have it under good authority that those weren't espressif's original target market either.

Not surprised, there’s some very capable chips that aren’t fully utilized, I think a lot of smart watches have a certain Nordic chip too. Know of any more ESP like chips?

Depends on what you mean by ESP like chips.

A ucontroller with way more compute and peripherals than it need for it's task, with either no or shoddy encryption on it's flash allowing you to write your own code or binary patch the existing code with a little elbow grease? That's most microcontrollers out there with the exception of chips by Broadcom (no flash and the patch RAM is already basically full fixing bugs in their crappy code ROM) or Nordic (because of the ubiquitous use of per device encrypted flash). Specific devices I've worked on in that capacity though are all tied up in NDAs with my employers though.

But what makes ESPs special is the community. Because of all of the public work put into them, it's an order of magnitude easier to manipulate them than pouring over a disassembly. You'd know about tchips like that if they existed. Bunnie tried to get that kind of community around the MT6260 chips, but it didn't really go anywhere.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#68

Post by ant6n »

retrac wrote: post #28
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…

> It seems a little like cheating to put modern microcontrollers inside the cartridge that do all the heavy lifting. As a sometimes hobbyist homebrewer, instinctively I am inclined to agree. But I'll argue the counter-case. The Game Boy (and consoles like the NES and SNES) were intended to be expanded with additional hardware in the cartridge, from the beginning in anticipation of new technology. There were commercia…

Actually you can display one full screen bitmap. Vram can hold 384 tiles, and the screen needs 360 tiles. It's gonna be difficult to update that, since there's no more vram for double buffering, you can only access vram during vblank and hblank, and there's no dma into vram (on the gbc it's possible, since it has a dma and double the vram).

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#69

Post by makeworld »

spicybright wrote: post #9
mediocregopher wrote: post #3

Wonderful, pure creativity and determination at work here. It's so cool to see what wild ideas people will follow through with. A gemini client would be a cool next step for this: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

I think gopher would be better, just by how much content is available on it and how stupid simple it is. But either option would be really flipping cool to see!

Gemini actually has more domains than Gopher these days, from the statistics I've seen. Maybe not more content, due to Gopher's history, it's hard to say.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#70

Post by GhettoComputers »

monocasa wrote: post #67
GhettoComputers wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not surprised, there’s some very capable chips that aren’t fully utilized, I think a lot of smart watches have a certain Nordic chip too. Know of any more ESP like chips?

Depends on what you mean by ESP like chips. A ucontroller with way more compute and peripherals than it need for it's task, with either no or shoddy encryption on it's flash allowing you to write your own code or binary patch the existing code with a little elbow grease? That's most microcontrollers out there with the exception of chips by Broadcom (no flash and the patch RAM is already basically full fixing bugs in…

Thank you. I think these hacks will be seen as a historical curiosity with an influx of RISC-V chips that will be more open, ExpressIf is moving to it and hackable IoT chips are utilizing them more too.
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