This has been done before: https://hackaday.io/project/20769-wifi-game-boy-cartridge
They talk about that project in the video.
There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I know, they were not for embedded systems, they were the embedded systems. They are just powerful arduino with wifi.
The programmablity wasn't the initial selling point. They were very much designed originally to be a shrink wrap addon to another embedded system. Most little single purpose ucontroller based products not made by Broadcom have an SDK for writing code for the device too, it just normally doesn't go anywhere. Espressif just sort of won the lottery and an ecosystem formed around them, but that wasn't their initial marke…
I didn't say they were sold as programmable/hackable. They were used in many simple smart devices like bulbs and power controllers already without any other microcontrollers. It was pretty obvious that it was doing all the work.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I know, they were not for embedded systems, they were the embedded systems. They are just powerful arduino with wifi.
The first esp modules were originally marketed and sold as simple serial ttl-to-wifi bridges, but it didn't take hardware hackers long to discover they were hiding a lot functionality underneath. It took some doing but eventually espressif opened up their toolchain and _that's_ when they became "powerful adruino with wifi."
They still are simple ttl-to-wifi bridges aren't they? They just had more processing power, it needed to be stronger than an arduino to run a web server and control with wifi. I don't think it was hidden as much as underutilized, like the linksys routers.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would be great. Playing unmodified multiplayer games w/ others locally wirelessly and, if latency allowed, over a network, would be a ton of fun. It would also allow for some players to be on physical hardware vs. emulators.
Oh, I didn't think about that. It'd probably take some interpretation of the individual game protocols to get over the hump of the latency, but probably doable.
This isn't a rabbit home I can go down right now, but there's some background here: https://blog.gbplay.io/2021/05/10/An-8-Bit-Idea_The-Internet...
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The programmablity wasn't the initial selling point. They were very much designed originally to be a shrink wrap addon to another embedded system. Most little single purpose ucontroller based products not made by Broadcom have an SDK for writing code for the device too, it just normally doesn't go anywhere. Espressif just sort of won the lottery and an ecosystem formed around them, but that wasn't their initial marke…
I didn't say they were sold as programmable/hackable. They were used in many simple smart devices like bulbs and power controllers already without any other microcontrollers. It was pretty obvious that it was doing all the work.
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.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#56It 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…
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.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say they were sold as programmable/hackable. They were used in many simple smart devices like bulbs and power controllers already without any other microcontrollers. It was pretty obvious that it was doing all the work.
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.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
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 find interesting!
If you dig enough, there's content you won't find anywhere on the modern web too, especially from really old sites that are still being hosted from back in the heyday. The further you go, the more old stuff you'll find.
It feels like exploring ancient ruins that have been long abandoned.
What's unique about Gopher (at least to me,) is it goes a bit beyond just hosting content like how we see the modern web. There's a lot of history and culture around it.
The protocol itself is extremely interesting to dig into. It's simple enough you can use telnet or curl to browse (clunkily of course), but there were many attempts to extend it in crazy ways. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GopherVR
How it started and became popular is very cool to look into as well.
Currently, the main content creators on gopher share a deep "counter-culture" attitude towards the modern web. You'll almost never find an ad, or junky blog posts that are nothing but fluff. No popups, no politics (like the EU banner thing), or even seeing a webpage being rendered as it loads.
It's all so simple the only thing you can host is pure content and links. And users/content creators take a lot of pride in that fact.
Anyways, apologies for the ramble. It's just a big passion of mine. Good luck on your first dive :)
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#59It 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.
Re: There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge
#60It 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…
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