Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

there.oughta.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 101 posts

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#71

Post by phreack »

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…

If you want to take that cheating to the logical extreme, check out this project made by a friend. It's explicit in the title that it's just streaming, but pretty fun nonetheless!

https://github.com/rodri042/gba-remote-play

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#72

Post by monocasa »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #70
monocasa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it could go either way. I get where you're coming from, but think it's equally likely that it'll go in the opposite direction. The underlying economic reasons behind why the internals of these chips aren't publicly exposed have a good chance of being exasperated by the in progress democratization of fabless chip design. More chips will be designed to fill a specific niche and not be publicly documented; that's because public documentation is a huge schlep that's not work towards their niche or value add. Yeah there'll be more RISC-V but most cores today are something supported by GCC as it is; that's not the impediment to understanding the chip, but instead everything custom around the CPU core is. And the openness of RISC-V could lead to fragmentation (but we have yet to see that, and I'll admit that's mainly an ARM propaganda talking point at the moment).

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#73

Post by kingcharles »

spicybright wrote: post #58
jedimastert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would I go about finding/discovering gopher content? That sounds like fun!

Oh man, you're in for a treat today :) So, while gopher works like any website (you can host your own server for people to visit), the main hub of the "gophersphere" is floodgap. It's run by someone who runs spiders to index sites, and maintains an html gopher proxy, so you can browse gopher sites from your browser. https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite So starting there will let you branch off to whatever you f…

What are these Gopher proxies of which you speak?

Still works fine for me on Mosaic 3.0...

https://archive.org/download/mosaic-ncsa-evolt_browsers/wind...

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#74

Post by icelancer »

spicybright wrote: post #58
jedimastert wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would I go about finding/discovering gopher content? That sounds like fun!

Oh man, you're in for a treat today :) So, while gopher works like any website (you can host your own server for people to visit), the main hub of the "gophersphere" is floodgap. It's run by someone who runs spiders to index sites, and maintains an html gopher proxy, so you can browse gopher sites from your browser. https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite So starting there will let you branch off to whatever you f…

Click the first link and....

"Malicious Activity Detected You appear to be using software associated with or exhibiting bot-like activity. This is banned for security reasons. If this is a legitimate access, please E-mail gopher@floodgap.com with an explanation. httpi/1.7.2 (nano_inetd_turbo/AIX) by Cameron Kaiser"

Well, never mind.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#75

Post by GhettoComputers »

monocasa wrote: post #72
GhettoComputers wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it could go either way. I get where you're coming from, but think it's equally likely that it'll go in the opposite direction. The underlying economic reasons behind why the internals of these chips aren't publicly exposed have a good chance of being exasperated by the in progress democratization of fabless chip design. More chips will be designed to fill a specific niche and not be publicly documented; that'…

Good points. They’re entitled to their research and development not being cloned. I think that fracturing is likely with RISC-V in the short term but a natural hegemony will form under some protocols, hopefully they don’t suck and can scale.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#77

Post by Gigachad »

Salgat wrote: post #59
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…

That's pretty common for cartridge based games. Want your gameboy to support RTC? Add an RTC chip on the cartridge. Need more RAM or persistent memory? Slap more in the cartridge. This is no different.

I think the general vibe from the OP comment is that a lot of the fun with low spec and retro hardware is working with restrictions and squeezing new and novel amounts of use out of old hardware. But once you get to the stage of putting a much much more powerful computer in the cartridge, you come to the realization that you can do basically anything at this point and treat the gameboy as a dumb display/input device. Now it's just regular embedded programming.

Not to detract from the project, it is very cool. But the excitement kinda feels dwindled when you realize that you now have limitless power and ability. It becomes just regular programming rather than a puzzle.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#78

Post by Gigachad »

hammock wrote: post #14
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…

Isn't that basically what modern computers do anyway? There is so much processing done outside the CPU. Graphics, network, security, etc

Yes, it's a completely logical thing to do. It just makes the project a little mundane and back to the practical computing of the real world. With a modern microcontroller you can do anything you want without limits. The gameboy becomes mostly irrelevant.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#79

Post by classichasclass »

icelancer wrote: post #74
spicybright wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, you're in for a treat today :) So, while gopher works like any website (you can host your own server for people to visit), the main hub of the "gophersphere" is floodgap. It's run by someone who runs spiders to index sites, and maintains an html gopher proxy, so you can browse gopher sites from your browser. https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite So starting there will let you branch off to whatever you f…

Click the first link and.... "Malicious Activity Detected You appear to be using software associated with or exhibiting bot-like activity. This is banned for security reasons. If this is a legitimate access, please E-mail gopher@floodgap.com with an explanation. httpi/1.7.2 (nano_inetd_turbo/AIX) by Cameron Kaiser" Well, never mind.

Please do send me the explanation. The proxy gets a lot of crap from bad bots (which in turn can make it burdensome on downstream sites) which requires controls, but the heuristics are just that, heuristic. If there's something to whitelist, I will.
Post reply on HN