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Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

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Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#91

Post by AussieWog93 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #45
deergomoo wrote: post #3

I absolutely adore the Game Boy modding scene that’s exploded in the last few years. Case overhauls like this or the Boxypixel slab pictured in the article, numerous backlit high-res IPS screen replacements, mods to improve sound, Li-ion battery packs with USB charging. And that’s to say nothing of Analogue or the MiSTer project, creating full FPGA reimplementations of the hardware. It’s a really cool example of what…

Sadly the original hardware is slowly degrading over time. Nintendo DS lite screens for example are all yellowing at this age. Buttons suffer too, my gameboy color is just a paperweight now because the buttons hardly register a press. Maybe these issues can be repaired but I’m not skilled with a soldering iron which is a big requirement it seems.

I run a video games business and fix button issues all the time!

All you'll need to do to fix a GBC with stuff buttons is open it up (requires a tri wing screwdriver, $2 from eBay), clean the button pads with a q-tip and alcohol.

The pads in question are the black bits on the back of the rubber immediately underneath the button, as well as the circular copper traces on the board that the black bits come into contact with when you depress the button.

You might need 3 or 4 q-tips. You'll know when you're done because the q-tips will stop turning black.

Takes 10 minutes overall and is only slightly more technical than wiping your arse! Don't be intimidated!

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#92

Post by rootw0rm »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #45
deergomoo wrote: post #3

I absolutely adore the Game Boy modding scene that’s exploded in the last few years. Case overhauls like this or the Boxypixel slab pictured in the article, numerous backlit high-res IPS screen replacements, mods to improve sound, Li-ion battery packs with USB charging. And that’s to say nothing of Analogue or the MiSTer project, creating full FPGA reimplementations of the hardware. It’s a really cool example of what…

Sadly the original hardware is slowly degrading over time. Nintendo DS lite screens for example are all yellowing at this age. Buttons suffer too, my gameboy color is just a paperweight now because the buttons hardly register a press. Maybe these issues can be repaired but I’m not skilled with a soldering iron which is a big requirement it seems.

I used to suck with a soldering iron, but if it's something that interests you, just give it a shot.

If you're deathly afraid of making mistakes, get a desoldering iron. If you mess up just suck the solder up, reapply a bit of flux as necessary, and try again.

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#93

Post by pzduniak »

rootw0rm wrote: post #92
kjkjadksj wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly the original hardware is slowly degrading over time. Nintendo DS lite screens for example are all yellowing at this age. Buttons suffer too, my gameboy color is just a paperweight now because the buttons hardly register a press. Maybe these issues can be repaired but I’m not skilled with a soldering iron which is a big requirement it seems.

I used to suck with a soldering iron, but if it's something that interests you, just give it a shot. If you're deathly afraid of making mistakes, get a desoldering iron. If you mess up just suck the solder up, reapply a bit of flux as necessary, and try again.

I recommend the Engineer SS-02 solder sucker. Way cheaper than a proper desoldering iron, way more effective than a cheap Chinese one.

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#94

Post by exmadscientist »

> I quickly discovered I’d accidentally put the footprint for my FPC connector on backwards:

That's how you tell the professionals from the novices! The professionals only get it wrong once. Per connector, of course. The novices can get it wrong up to five times, which is really impressive! (The novice in question may or may not have been me.)

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#95

Post by ngold »

deergomoo wrote: post #3

I absolutely adore the Game Boy modding scene that’s exploded in the last few years. Case overhauls like this or the Boxypixel slab pictured in the article, numerous backlit high-res IPS screen replacements, mods to improve sound, Li-ion battery packs with USB charging. And that’s to say nothing of Analogue or the MiSTer project, creating full FPGA reimplementations of the hardware. It’s a really cool example of what…

Didn't even know this was a thing. And I immediately fell in love. What a great hobby. I remember my first game boy. You could probably knock someone out throwing it. And it would be fine.

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#96

Post by whizzter »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #91
kjkjadksj wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly the original hardware is slowly degrading over time. Nintendo DS lite screens for example are all yellowing at this age. Buttons suffer too, my gameboy color is just a paperweight now because the buttons hardly register a press. Maybe these issues can be repaired but I’m not skilled with a soldering iron which is a big requirement it seems.

I run a video games business and fix button issues all the time! All you'll need to do to fix a GBC with stuff buttons is open it up (requires a tri wing screwdriver, $2 from eBay), clean the button pads with a q-tip and alcohol. The pads in question are the black bits on the back of the rubber immediately underneath the button, as well as the circular copper traces on the board that the black bits come into contact…

Ahh, I had one I looked at once, the pads not being supposed to be black does bring back questions I had >D

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#97

Post by derefr »

hnlmorg wrote: post #62
derefr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love it too, though I wish that along with it there was renewed interest in Gameboy game development. There are GB game-jams, but more-often-than-not the results of those just languish in obscurity rather than seeing any community attention; and so there's no incentive to put any polish into these titles. (There's nobody trying to make anything like David Murray's Planet X3 for the GB scene.) I feel like something…

There’s loads of homebrew Gameboy games released each year. One of my friends reviews games and receives lots of new GB and GBA titles. You can also get GB carts that support SD card. I appreciate you’re describing a more complete, end to end, UX but we can already do everything right up to inserting the SD card into the Gameboy cart. With Gameboy emulation as good as it is, you could do away with original hardware f…

I didn't say people don't make them. I said they aren't polished. And by that, I don't mean the gameplay!

Rather, I mean that nobody's fabbing GB game carts, printing glossy color manuals for them, putting them in boxes, and shipping them to Kickstarter backers. Nobody's translating these games into 10 languages. Nobody's QA-testing the heck out of them to ensure they don't have any obscure edge-case bugs. Etc. (This was why I brought up Planet X3: it's an example of a modern retro-game that is polished in exactly this sense.)

But a desire to go through all the effort to create polished modern GB games, is the sort of thing that requires market demand — a willingness to spend real money to buy new GB games (whether digitally or physically.) No hobbyist game developer is going to spend a year on "things that aren't programming" to make a nice shippable product out of their game, if that isn't going to result in at least breaking even on their effort.

And a prerequisite for that demand, is public awareness of the fact that modern GB games are being created — and, more importantly, a public "brand" awareness for the people creating them!

Indie game jams are great and all; but they don't create brand awareness. App Stores with "studios with most stars" views create brand awareness. Easily one-click accessibility of the games to allow them to be played on a PC (rather than on a portable with no video-capture support), to enable streamers and content-creators to play them on a whim, create brand awareness. Gamedev tooling that expects/requires a "publisher logo card" to be shown on boot, create brand awareness. Etc.

Basically, think of "modern gameboy games" as if they were a thing made by one company, rather than a diffuse community. What would that company be doing to market them? The community can do those things too!

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#98

Post by johnwalkr »

javawizard wrote: post #39
johnwalkr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a form labs printer at work and while the resolution was great, it was very messy to deal with, parts were brittle, curing took a long time, support structure was annoying to remove (and very time consuming to remove traces of), and over weeks or months most parts with any significant feature longer in one dimension warped. I don’t think anyone used it once as soon as we got an FDM printer.

> and over weeks or months most parts with any significant feature longer in one dimension warped That's alarming. How bad are we talking about, like millimeters or fractions thereof? I really, really like the appearance of the case from TFA and would love to build similar enclosures for my projects, but if that comes at the expense of noticeable long term dimensional instability, no thanks.

In a 10cm part, could get someone 3mm of warping perpendicular to the longest dimension. Admittedly, this can be mitigated by adding ribs and being careful about curing, but between this, messiness and brittleness, it was just fussy compared to FDM printing.

This was already five years ago so I wouldn’t discount the technology altogether, I would just check for the printer and material you’re interested in.

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#99

Post by Semaphor »

> I have a distinct memory of dismissing the whole Pokémon craze as gauche, childlike, beneath my refined nearly-adult maturity.

I mean, of course, Pokémon was childlike. Us almost-adults played clearly superior games like MtG with cardboard. The GameBoy was for Tetris.

Re: Adding a hinge to a Game Boy that God never intended

#100

Post by laumars »

derefr wrote: post #97
hnlmorg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s loads of homebrew Gameboy games released each year. One of my friends reviews games and receives lots of new GB and GBA titles. You can also get GB carts that support SD card. I appreciate you’re describing a more complete, end to end, UX but we can already do everything right up to inserting the SD card into the Gameboy cart. With Gameboy emulation as good as it is, you could do away with original hardware f…

I didn't say people don't make them. I said they aren't polished. And by that, I don't mean the gameplay! Rather, I mean that nobody's fabbing GB game carts, printing glossy color manuals for them, putting them in boxes, and shipping them to Kickstarter backers. Nobody's translating these games into 10 languages. Nobody's QA-testing the heck out of them to ensure they don't have any obscure edge-case bugs. Etc. (This…

> Rather, I mean that nobody's fabbing GB game carts, printing glossy color manuals for them, putting them in boxes, and shipping them to Kickstarter backers.

Maybe not Kickstarter specifically, but they are doing the other stuff.

> Nobody's translating these games into 10 languages.

That's a little unreasonable ask. Given how little money these games will bring in you can't expect that.

> Nobody's QA-testing the heck out of them to ensure they don't have any obscure edge-case bugs. Etc. (This was why I brought up Planet X3: it's an example of a modern retro-game that is polished in exactly this sense.)

There is QA testing happening but like with the above, you can't expect smaller operations to pay people to QA. So you end up either having "QA" be demo builds, in which case most people end up with a copy so you can't do the premium carts that you're also asking for. Or you just have to accept that QA is a smaller operation but still have the beautiful hardware copy.

Even really well polished games on other platforms with much bigger audiences, like Xeno Crisis for the Mega Drive / Genesis, have had their share of bugs too. Even in the original days of these consoles, when games from big studios with big budgets to spend on testing, we'd still see new releases with bugs-galore.

> But a desire to go through all the effort to create polished modern GB games, is the sort of thing that requires market demand — a willingness to spend real money to buy new GB games (whether digitally or physically.) No hobbyist game developer is going to spend a year on "things that aren't programming" to make a nice shippable product out of their game, if that isn't going to result in at least breaking even on their effort.

This doesn't even happen with new games on current generation consoles. So I don't understand why you're expecting it to happen with retro-consoles.

> And a prerequisite for that demand, is public awareness of the fact that modern GB games are being created — and, more importantly, a public "brand" awareness for the people creating them!

I don't think awareness is the problem. I think most people just don't care. If you're a retro gamer you are probably already aware, and if you're not then you're never going to play these games anyway. And I honestly can't blame people for not caring. There's so much content out there these days that GB games (with all the warts that the GB hardware had, by modern day standards) simple aren't going to appeal to most people.

I think you're setting your expectations far too high.

> Indie game jams are great and all; but they don't create brand awareness

Again, there are plenty of releases that aren't the results of game jams.

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