Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
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Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
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Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#2This will be worth billions of dollars in a post war apocalypse when electricity no longer exists.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#3This will be worth billions of dollars in a post war apocalypse when electricity no longer exists.
I'll give you a half billion for a water wheel, roll of wire, and a magnet.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#4When I was a kid I had a toy electronics kit and one of the circuits was an AM radio that worked without batteries. A normal radio station signal is strong enough to drive a pair of earbuds without any additional power. Since then I've always wondered if you could harvest that same radio energy to power other things without batteries, maybe even a Game Boy. There's electromagnetic radiation in the air all around us. And I'm sure you could build a Game Boy using today's tech that's much more power efficient than the ones from the 90s.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#5I suspect actually reimplementing the original GameBoy SoC in a modern low-power process could provide a significant improvement over the inefficiency of an emulator.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#6This is definitely achievable! When I was a young, we'd take long road trips and my Gameboy (original) would run out of battery. I'd use a small solar panel (in place of one of the batteries) from a science kit to keep going, propped up against the back window. The wires and panel were held in place with chewing gum (yes, kids can be gross).
I did have the "frequent power failures". Props to the team on fixing this :)
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#7Looks like they used an existing emulator and this was mostly a hardware and memory integrity experiment. I’d love to see this approached from the perspective of “how clever can we get with the emulator itself to save power?”
When I wrote mine, something I ran into was realizing that often the CPU and PPU are just doing the same thing over and over and over. If only I could cache all that work.
For example, you don’t modify the previous frame. You have to draw the entire frame every time, writing sprites from OAM memory every time. Sometimes games do clever stuff here for effects, but a lot of the time you’re just drawing the same stuff. Like Tetris is almost completely a routine of drawing almost entirely the same graphics every time. Most of the cycles and OAM writes are just juggling sprites to draw the same layout every time.
I documented the heck out of the PPU because it gave me the second most grief (sound being the worst by far) if you are curious: https://github.com/ablakey/gameboy/blob/master/src/guest/sys... (goodness I’m proud of this project. Don’t tell my boss. He’ll want this level of documentation at work ;) )
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#8When I was a kid I had a toy electronics kit and one of the circuits was an AM radio that worked without batteries. A normal radio station signal is strong enough to drive a pair of earbuds without any additional power. Since then I've always wondered if you could harvest that same radio energy to power other things without batteries, maybe even a Game Boy. There's electromagnetic radiation in the air all around us.…
> I've always wondered if you could harvest that same radio energy to power other things without batteries
That's how passive RFID tags work. The tag has a tiny little computer, and you hold it near a thing that emits an electric field that energizes it.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#9This will be worth billions of dollars in a post war apocalypse when electricity no longer exists.
Once a GameBoy, now GameMan.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#10Looks like they used an existing emulator and this was mostly a hardware and memory integrity experiment. I’d love to see this approached from the perspective of “how clever can we get with the emulator itself to save power?” When I wrote mine, something I ran into was realizing that often the CPU and PPU are just doing the same thing over and over and over. If only I could cache all that work. For example, you don’t…
That was a pleasure to read through. Made me think of literate code.