Or just have a battery that recharges so that you never have to swap it and make it incredibly power efficient
Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
91–100 of 170 posts
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#92I suspect actually reimplementing the original GameBoy SoC in a modern low-power process could provide a significant improvement over the inefficiency of an emulator.
I was under the impression that doing things directly in custom silicon was always more efficient than emulation (all other things held fixed) both from a performance and power consumption perspective. The problem of course is that it costs orders of magnitude more money to implement, to say nothing of the difficulty in designing/testing the thing. It's basically the same progression we saw in bitcoin mining: Custom…
I'm pretty sure @userbinator is talking about taking the exact same circuit but making it on something like TSMC's 4nm process, rather than an emulator running on a general purpose processor (i.e. CPU)
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#93Looks 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…
Instead of software emulation, why not hardware emulation? The original Gameboy ran on two AA batteries for 12-20 hours (depending on whether the light was on); I'd argue that rebuilding the original hardware with modern-day technologies could reduce that energy consumption by 90% or more.
> The original Gameboy ran on two AA batteries for 12-20 hours (depending on whether the light was on)
I wonder if you googled for this? Googling for “original gameboy battery life” gives nearly this exact quote, but then reading the wikipedia article that it came from reveals that this is talking about the Gameboy Light (1998 - arguably “the original hardware with modern technology to reduce energy consumption”). I went and fact-checked because I remembered that the original original gameboy (1989) had 4 AA batteries and no light ;)
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#94Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#95When 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.…
There's an urban legend in the UK about a radio station having a dead spot in their signal. They send the boffins out to figure out what's going on, and they eventually track down someone who has filled his attic with coils of baling wire and is running his house lights off the radio station.
(Yes, I know all the practical objections. It's an urban legend. I've seen variations involving BBC radio, TV broadcasts, submarine communications, overhead power lines, the VLF transmitter at Rugby, and a farmer using the energy to milk his cows).
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parents realized I'd still quietly read without the gameboy, plus I'd already been given rechargeable batteries.
Aha, so a clever ploy to get you to practice reading and learn about taking care of your own needs? My apologies to your parents, I clearly underestimated them! :)
No, they just didn't want the wire snaking through the center console. Maybe not wanting to lose the lighter was a secondary goal, but I doubt there was any lesson behind their decision.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#97Oddly enough, the "energy harvesting switches" they used in this are commercial products! https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/zf-electronics/AF... https://switches-sensors.zf.com/us/product/energy-harvesting...
Neither lists a price, and it seems the former has a minimum quantity of "5,000" which I take to mean 5'000 but might be localised to mean 5, you never know
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#98Funny I thought they'd harvest the button press energy before clicking and they did! An idea I had a while ago but laughed it off as impossible
I thought it would be a battery to wall charger adapter. I was wrong but the article did not disappoint.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#99I guess Solar powered Game Boy would make for less attractive title.
Because that's not all it is.
They didn't just take a console and slap a solar panel on top and wired that into the battery compartment.
They took a new CPU, buttons, etc. and run an inefficient emulator (goes to show how big the energy budget is) with auto save state before turning off from lack of light/button energy.
Arguably, the former is way more useful in the short run, as you could actually use it for more than ten seconds at a time and retrofit any device easily. But as a research project, the latter is way more useful because it might pave the path to this being viable in the future and having an entirely new class of devices.
Re: Battery-free Game Boy (2020)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of software emulation, why not hardware emulation? The original Gameboy ran on two AA batteries for 12-20 hours (depending on whether the light was on); I'd argue that rebuilding the original hardware with modern-day technologies could reduce that energy consumption by 90% or more.
> The original Gameboy ran on two AA batteries for 12-20 hours (depending on whether the light was on) I wonder if you googled for this? Googling for “original gameboy battery life” gives nearly this exact quote, but then reading the wikipedia article that it came from reveals that this is talking about the Gameboy Light (1998 - arguably “the original hardware with modern technology to reduce energy consumption”). I…
It's worth noting that back then AA batteries were less efficient. Which is why later when AA's got better Nintendo was able to release the Gameboy pocket and Gameboy color using only 2 batteries.