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There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

there.oughta.be

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Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#91

Post by pezezin »

theamk wrote: post #5

That design is badly missing some registers (D-type flip-flops) -- the whole "let's read/write multiple bytes and discard the first one because the ESP is not ready yet" seems like a super hacky solution. A pair of something like 74574's would make this so much easier. When sending to ESP, register latches the last byte written and then ESP can read it at its leisure. When reading from ESP, ESP pre-loads the data int…

I'm not an expert, but I think a better solution would be to use a dual ported RAM that both the ESP and the Gameboy can access. The Gameboy has a dedicated memory area for cartridge RAM, A000 to BFFF.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#92

Post by stephen_g »

Very cool project, and impressive he got it working!

I feel like possibly a better way to deal with the communication though might be to put a dual-port RAM [e.g. 1] in-between the gameboy and the microcontroller, and load in a program to it so the Gameboy is just waiting for certain areas of memory to be updated (with flags that one side sets as 'new data' and then the gameboy flips). Basically some kind of circular buffer of commands, and as long as there's enough space in there and you only fill it from the microcontroller slower than the Gameboy can process them, you wouldn't need to have careful synchronisation. The microcontroller just has to check that the next slot in the circular buffer has had its status bit flipped to 'processed' (or hasn't been used yet) before putting the next command/data in.

1. https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/memory-logic/multi-po...

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#93

Post by tikiman163 »

I know this isn't a humor website, but I'm seriously tempted to post the "but why?" meme. My personal mantra is that everything worth doing is difficult, but I've always had the perspective that this is not a symetric relationship.

This was certainly difficult for him to do, and the engineering aspects of it are "cool", but this doesn't solve an actual problem. With the same amount of effort he could have written new/better drivers for a raspberry-pi peripheral, or contributed to one of the open source OS projects in a meaningful way. Hell, if this he did this just for fun, then this is definitely the kind of guy who burns out well before they turn 40.

Efforts like this shouldn't be applauded or critically reviewed with advice to make it better, they should be discouraged. This kind of project is not merely a waste of time, if it were I would have no valid complaint to make. It is a waste of time that burns out a highly capable person, and too many people in the tech community are ready to applaud the effort.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#94

Post by Pompidou »

tikiman163 wrote: post #93

I know this isn't a humor website, but I'm seriously tempted to post the "but why?" meme. My personal mantra is that everything worth doing is difficult, but I've always had the perspective that this is not a symetric relationship. This was certainly difficult for him to do, and the engineering aspects of it are "cool", but this doesn't solve an actual problem. With the same amount of effort he could have written new…

It's a very weird opinion. In this way : good writers loose their time by writing good books while they would better write good documentations and advertisements for tech products, good political leader would better lead tech companies instead of taking care of the people every day life, and so on. I personally think the world would be far better if everybody was able to deploy such skills and talent in everyday life instead of giving all their full potential to private companies.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#95

Post by sonovice »

tikiman163 wrote: post #93

I know this isn't a humor website, but I'm seriously tempted to post the "but why?" meme. My personal mantra is that everything worth doing is difficult, but I've always had the perspective that this is not a symetric relationship. This was certainly difficult for him to do, and the engineering aspects of it are "cool", but this doesn't solve an actual problem. With the same amount of effort he could have written new…

I can only speak for myself but having a fun (but non-trivial) hacks side project helps me to actually prevent burn out.

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#96

Post by pvillano » 

    All The Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
    Layin' In The Sun,
    Talkin' 'Bout The Things
    They Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda Done...
    But All Those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas
    All Ran Away And Hid
    From One Little Did.
-Shel Silverstein

That being said, the way I would have done it is...

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#97

Post by thehappypm »

tikiman163 wrote: post #93

I know this isn't a humor website, but I'm seriously tempted to post the "but why?" meme. My personal mantra is that everything worth doing is difficult, but I've always had the perspective that this is not a symetric relationship. This was certainly difficult for him to do, and the engineering aspects of it are "cool", but this doesn't solve an actual problem. With the same amount of effort he could have written new…

Learning is pointless now?

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#98

Post by [deleted] »

sdenton4 wrote: post #19
roywiggins wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge

#100

Post by msk-lywenn »

nsxwolf wrote: post #56
DizzyDoo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And really, from its very launch the base SNES couldn't handle most of its library - even Pilotwings, a day 1 launch title, needed an extra chip to handle its enhanced mode 7 background effects.

The most interesting one being the SA-1 chip, imho. It's the exact same processor as in the SNES except clocked three times faster, 10.74MHz instead of 3.58MHz. This means you can hack games to have their original code run on the SA-1 instead of the original CPU. Which is exactly what Vitor Vitela did for numerous games to remove their massive slowdowns.

https://github.com/VitorVilela7/SA1-Root

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