WiFi Game Boy Cartridge
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- Опубликовано: 15 дек 2021
- I created a Game Boy cartridge with built-in WiFi. At the moment, there are only two demonstrations, a simple serial communication and getting articles from Wikipedia. However, getting to this point was not as easy as it might seem...
Schematics, source code and detailed explanations can be found at
there.oughta.be/a/wifi-game-b...
Blog there.oughta.be
Reddit / thereoughtabe
Twitter / diconx
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Mildly curious, if the interrupt to pin input speed being too short for the ESP32 to read was the main issue, would adding 8/16-bit storage registers on the data/address pins so they retained their state for the full duration between clocks be an option?
Jepp, I think that would be what I would try if I ever do a next version. To be honest, the current design was based on using the ESP-12F (ESP8266) that I know and still had "in stock" and the naive assumption that interrupts were fast enough. On the other hand, my current method only has negligible overhead for the ESP-to-GameBoy direction (the one wasted read at the beginning) and speeding up the interrupt code is probably more important at that point. For the other direction, things are quite differen - here a buffer would greatly improve things.
In the end, it is the design that finally worked and designing another PCB, buying components, soldering everything and updating the code for a pure fun and proof-of-concept project is not really worth it. So, I think I will mention some of the many suggestions from the comments around the web in a follow up video, to share it with those who want to learn from such projects.
I think the cleanest solution would be to add a CPLD that handles the address decoding and contains latches to handle the read and write data - When you write to the logic, it stashes the value written into the latch and then gates it out to the ESP data lines later. The other way, you write to the CPLD from the ESP and have a GB readable status register that has "I got stuff for you" flag. It would also get rid of the discrete decode logic.
I have to admit that I do not even know precisely what a CPLD does :) Sounds like something I should look into.
@@ThereOughtaBe Mostly, a CPLD does precisely what you tell it to. It's a bunch of programmable logic functions, mostly like those gates you used for address decoding, but often including a handful of registers. A typical use is for bus arbitration, and you may have seen a few of the smaller variants, PALs or GALs, handling glue logic in small computers. FPGAs tend to extend this with far more registers, many more internal functions, and some memory - to the degree they can fully implement a computer like the GameBoy. Together they're known as Programmable Logic Devices.
@@ThereOughtaBe The name pretty much sums it up - "Complex programmable logic device" - it's basically a smaller and less capable version of a FPGA, but also a lot cheaper. A couple of latches with 3-state outputs, an address decoder and some logic is exactly the sort of level of complexity they are targeted at.
"because I can" is literally one of the best excuses to do "stupid" shit like this - you learn so much about things this way. Glad to see somebody else sharing this attitude.
Sincerely,
A fellow "because I can-er" ♥️
Or even the opposite… smart stuff. And when I say smart I also mean useful. I love the because I can too thing but nothing about this is stupid in my opinion.
A Gameboy with Internet?? I’d use that today. I’m pretty much on one as I’m typing this… IPhone 10 😊
It would be awesome to add a wifi module to an Everdrive. Imagine being able to manage roms and saves over network. Maybe even sync save files across multiple devices.
Maybe some online multiplayer too :o
bruh that’s a fantastic idea
This is what I though this would be.
USB might be faster? (I have an SD2SNES which has an USB port, but afaik it doesn't have that functionality - you have to use SD cards, which would get tedious if you'd want to test your own software)
If you open one of the Everdrives up you'll understand why, especially the Everdrive GBA X5.
A+ Project and video. I've not watched another electronics/software project with such high quality animations and transitions (even from 1mil+ sub channels). Can't wait to see what else you work on.
i am an idiot and have no clue about creating electronics, but man i love the information in this i feel like i have barely scratched the surface of this
I mean, we don't need this as a product, but this was hella fun to watch and I admire your dedication.
Nothing beats the feeling of making something work.
Ehhm. Except we don't?
Yup :)
Maybe we don't need this as a product yet, until Seb finds a way to steam games onto the Game Boy. And Oh Boy, then many will want this cartridge
@@Tutterzoid Now I can just imagine CS:GO on the Gameboy💀💀💀
This "cartridge" probably has more processing power than Gameboy itself.
It definitely does, people use ESP32s to build Gameboy emulators
Quoting cartridge got me dying
There is a special type of memory you can use. Renesas sells the 7007 32kB 5V Dual Port RAM and the 70v07 3.3V counterpart. This chip acts as a normal static RAM which can be directly connected to the address/data bus. However it has two intedended ports so two processors (the ESP and the GB) can work on the chip at the same time. You can write data from one port and read it from another, and the RAM chip will take care of everything. The chip even has got semaphere logic and interrupt outputs so one processor can send commands and notifications to the other one. This would also make the EEPROM on your module obsolete, and software updates would be quite convenient - the ESP fillst the SRAM, resets the GB, and the GB executes the code in the SRAM.
this is exactly what i was thinking aswell! I think this has amazing potential. you might even be able to do it without resetting the gb, but just feeding it a jump instruction to the right memory address at the end of your write. I would love to work on something like this.
I can imagine a small OS running on the cartridge being able to put anything (like roms) on the ram chip from the internet, so you can have a bunch of programs on a NAS share and download these live with the wifi chip. Flash it onto the ram chip and bam. Might need to incorporate a button on the cartridge to reflash the OS onto RAM so you can change the program. Maybe this could also be done for a GBC/GBA cartridge
Thoroughly enjoyed the graphical explanation made me smile.
wow, this is just amazing. The animations as well as idea and execution are just absolutely astounding! Thanks
Fantastic project, and thankyou for the detailed explanation of how this all works and your work around the finicky Game Boy.
Really Great work. And super nice blender renders.
A while back I was trying to learn to code for the gameboy and my first project was to try and implement Twitter via the link cable
The project didn’t get very far due to my lack of knowledge in C, but I had a few working prototypes that could flip through some preprogrammed tweets and “like” or “retweet” them
I also worked on images but due to my lack of memory management knowledge I couldn’t get anything to work
I never got along to adding link cable data transfer, I got frustrated and moved on :)
All of this was done in an emulator so it was never tested on original hardware :P
I would love to see someone complete my vision and make TwitterBoy a reality, and this is one step closer! Good work!
Imagine getting cancelled through a gameboy
This is super awesome, and I couldn't help but notice that you said that the audio pin was useless. I challenge you to expand on your current chip, and make a new one that can wirelessly get music, convert it to a playable audio that he gameboy could output, and then play a favorite song of yours
It was as interesting as I thought when I wrote on your teaser video! Awesome work!! I learned a lot as well about emulating and it surely seems to be difficult but you really have a mind for it, really awesome to see! Can't wait to see what you come up with in the future!
This is *SOOO* cool! Especially your visuals, really top notch
First time watching one of your videos. Excellent video production. Really enjoyed this.
The content was fascinating, well delivered, and production values are amazing 👌👏
Awesome project! You should get in touch with Elliott from the retro future. He’d love this!
"The creator took the approach that i first had in mind, and that probably many of you had too"
Me who has no idea about working on Gameboy cartidges: "Yep"
Your animations are on point. Not just the 3D ones, either. The one about the microcontroller with ADHD got the point across very well, and very quickly. I don't always have the energy to watch intensely intellectual engineering videos like this, but I think I'll sub anyway.
aw yeh I loved the hand drawn animations they were so fun ^_^
the board animation looks very clean, i also liked the transitions between 3d and real life
Brilliant things like this are so incredibly exciting to imagine the possibilities of what could be possible, like imagine if the person who found that prototype Workboy keyboard uploads the schematics for people to 3D print it and then apply it to this amazing new tech.
Your descriptions are hilarious, lovely video
Channels like this are what makes RUclips great!
Really well done! And such a well-made video on it all. Thanks for all the effort you put into this. :)
your hand-drawn animations are fantastic :D
Hehe, I usually write the voice over first and then add the visuals with some shots of the device, some renders, some schematics etc. But at that point I had no idea what to show without actually figuring out how many cycles the CPU really needs.
So, yeah. I decided to fully own that quick doodle style (partly because I don't think I could draw better if I tried).
This is awesome, I'm not even a minute into the video yet and I love it.
Loved the ROM Chip and CPU illustrations.
I wish I understood even a quarter of this video, it is still incredibly well made.
Makes me think of an idea I had a while back : making a game boy telephone cartridge.
It's be similar to this except that instead of WiFi it'd have a 2g modem with a sim card connector and a microphone. When you call someone, you'd use the GB upside down so your ear is over the gb's speaker and the phone would be near your mouth, inside the cartridge (the cartridge could look similar to the game boy camera's)
Would be pretty nice to call my mom on a GB
I would use it on a Gba sp. Ultimate flip phone
I think GBs don't have a PCM channel, or anything like that. They only use the built in sound font (oscillators). Could be wrong though.
@@westelaudio943 The audio pin in the cartridge interface works.
uh mom could never call during gameplay... and also..." lemme just install the right game card to call emergency services" 👀🤪 i mean better than nothing and derpy but at least it'd work. know what I mean?
Such a well edited and presented video. You truly are a renaissance man!
Video production quality and rendering is amazeing. Well done!
Oh this is such a cool project. Very well made. It really helps that I've watched all of Ben Heck's videos so that all the signal and gate stuff makes sense 😅 I had a dream as a teen to build a similar thing for GBA, but I was missing so many skills to even begin.
"a similar thing for GBA"
Keep following gen 3 ROM hacking scene
This might be motivating enough to try and get the parallel I2S going on the ESP32, so DMA will be possible, allowing for faster pin communication. Great work on the video, renders and explanations - you did your homework :)
My thoughts exactly. Lol
Too many acronyms
The bigger issues is the non deterministic interrupt latency for the ESP32. ESP-IDF is not effective at sub millisecond realtime applications. The esp8266 is actually more effective at realtime applications since it has way less bloat than ESP-IDF on the ESP32.
1.Saw the title.
2.Watched the video.
3. Liked it and immediately subscribed.
Thanks algorithm for showing me this and thanks T.O.B. for such amazing contents. 😁👌🏻
Dude!! This is so amazing! Definitely gained a subscriber today
I really love your renders.
Reminds me a lot of Tom7 (suckerpinch) and his attempts to use a Raspberry Pi as an NES cartridge. He calls this "reverse emulation". He ended up actually using software to *predict* what address the NES would request next cycle, and writing it ahead of time. Turns out the memory access is generally predictable enough that this works ok, only resulting in occasional glitches!
That was a very cool 😎 video and i would love if that project was expanded and more people explored it
Thanks, I found Tom7's video from another comment and enjoyed it a lot. But I already achieved video streaming through my cartridge (teaser here: studio.ruclips.net/user/videocxs_nHnqNB0/comments, still working on the full video with details) and my solution is surprisingly different from his because of how different the Game Boy works - or rather which different limitations it imposes.
The NES cartridges have two distinct memory buses. One for the "ordinary" ROM, accessed by the CPU, and one for video data that is directly accessed by the "Pixel Processing Unit" (PPU). Tom7 can therefore directly feed the graphics data from his cartridge to the PPU, but he has to deal with the problem that he cannot tell it what to do and hence he needs to predict its reads.
On the Game Boy, I need to write the graphics data to VRAM through the CPU. I do not have to predict anything, because I can tell the CPU exactly what to do and when to read the data from the ROM, but I have to deal with a different limitation: The PPU only allows the CPU to write to VRAM in short intervals when it isn't accessing VRAM itself (1ms inbetween frames and about 60µs inbetween lines), which makes it quite hard to get the data for a full image in there at a rate that can still be called "video" (I had to write the video streaming entirely in Assembly).
BTW: Huge fan of yours and a subscriber (with my private account) since your first appearance on Computerphile :)
Ridiculous premise, ridiculously enjoyable video. Production on point. Love it, and have immediately subscribed.
„There oughta be… because I can“
Here, have my instant subscription. Didn‘t even watch a video yet.
whoa, that was really high end content. well done. subscribed.
It was your first video I had a pleasure to watch. The project was very ambitious, but the montage... this is a whole different level.
I am in complete awe, you gained a new subscriber.
wow all that extra effort is on a whole new level
This was extremely entertaining, informative, and impressive all in one. Well presented and congrats on the killer lookin project!
This is exactly, why I love cartridge-based systems.
Yeah I wish more things would use cartridges, imagine how cool it would be if someone made a open source handheld console that uses cartridges see how far the hardware/software could be pushed
Really? Because this is fixing the limitation of a cartridge-based system.
@@fossforever512
Like, seriously dude? Now we have USB port, that pushed technology to an unimaginable level. Where have you been for the last 20 years dummy?
@@dIancaster With a cartridge. DVDs and game downloads are incapable of this.
One day, games may come packed again in cartridges made of SSDs, as it is becoming less expensive and games are sucking so much storage from users SSDs.
Very interesting. I will be making one of these and I have some ideas of other things to do with this. Thank you for sharing the pcb and code.
Congratulations for the awesome project!
This was great and really educational! Thanks so much for designing and sharing in such well explained detail and with all the impressive graphics/animation! They in themselves must have taken ages let alone the time to actually do the project!
you totally gotta show this to the retro future when you're done with it, he'd love it!
I guess he would, I was admin on his discord for a while and we had a channel for updates concerning my wifi cartridge project. I had plans to send him one once it was finished.
(But sadly he fired us because me and the mods pointed out a issue with the patreon bot and took it badly).
@@JS7457 that sounds pretty cool, how similar was it to this one? also did you guys split up roughly or was it just a sort of business decision, sorry to hear it
@@ethand4784 Oh no I was the only one working on it, the mods liked so I made a channel for updates. Eliot wasn't even aware of it since he was mostly inactive.
My cartridge isn't finished, was quite busy, I got the first prototype working tho, now I'm gonna use a proper pcb to avoid messy wires.
I post updates on my discord server times to times.
You must have spent so much time to create those few second of cartridge-into-gameboy animation at the end. Don't fuss about such things... We're here for the great content. 🙂
fu, this 3D model was pure beaty with the texture of real GB and others with the mix of PCB renders
@@filda2005 One day you'll read this conversation and be embarrassed. You're welcome.
Amazing. This is beyond me, and I'm in tech. You guys lead the world, everyone else are just mouth breathers.
This is incredible. 13.9k subscribers?! Expected to see 100k based on the quality
This is so uselessly brilliant. Love it.
This is cool! The first thing it made me think of was the Mobile Adapter GB used in Japan (Most notably for Pokemon Crystal to allow online connectivity). I always love to learn about interesting and obscure GB peripherals (And home-made ones, of course!)
that "moinsen" really through me off
for a video in my recommended this was pretty good, keep it up
This is so dang cool! I really enjoyed the video and am looking forward to seeing more!
How did you make the animations coz they look very good. Thanks
this is so interesting overall, but I'm completely captivated by the 3d render at 8:40
Good vid! I enjoy you breaking down how everything worked.
Your knowledge makes me furious and happy at the same time hahah cool projects man!
This is a superb piece of design - great explanation, too. Excellent! Have you considered using a power supervisor to delay start-up of the ESP slightly to reduce the power peak at power on? Superb work, very interesting. Well done!
I like how you listed all the guidelines at the end of what you kind of need to do this.
I meet all that criteria except one. There's no way in hell I'm going to have time to do this. That is a shitload of work, man. Good job.
That's kinda what keeps me from learning hardware. I'm super interested in it, but just don't have the energy + time to sink into it. So i enjoy living vicariously through vids like this.
I love projects like this because they harken back to when game devs had to come up with novel ways of solving problems within the restrictions of the hardware. Nowadays, we have the luxury of everything running on gaming PC hardware with plenty of headroom for any schmuck to vomit out a decent game without having to worry about any of the low-level stuff.
Holy shit the production value of this is off the charts. To the top!
what an awesome project !!!
first of all this channel is amazing its almost unbelievable that you dont have a high sub count, as an electronics enthusiast you channel is one i will definitely keep an eyo out for, also how would something like a fpga perform if you pair it with an esp8266, if its programmed well enough it probably should be fast enough.
wait, this isn't the guy from LiveOverflow?
Dude this is really amazing! I enjoyed this! :)
Really cool engineering approach!
What a nice project! Thanks for sharing!
I also used WiFi in one of my cartridge projects for NES, but it's manged entirely on software level - much more simple then yours ;)
Ich verstehe nur die Hälfte aber finde es super interessant. Darüber hinaus haben deine Videos eine hohe Produktionsqualität, top. Danke für deinen Content!
er ist deutsch😂
@@h3ryfx Darum ist mein Kommentar ja auch in Deutsch. Habe mich auf die technischen Hintergründe und nicht auf die Sprache bezogen.
This was amazingly interesting going to be looking through your older videos new subscriber great work.
The fact your out nerding me says alot! Another fact is that I can follow along and I get what you did and how you did it, I mean the part that you explained it all is aside from that, but for me I'm just like damn it that's alot a hell of a background you must have brother. 🐱 Impressive
jesus. hats off to you!
素晴らしい！
日本より敬意を込めて。
Amazing video thanks, I was looking forward to this!
Really interesting project and great information. Loved the animations too :P
What an awesome project! Funnily enough my friend and I were theory crafting how this would work over Thanksgiving but with a slightly different purpose. To download ROM files and upload save states on the fly to a local server.
For some reason my previous comment disappeared
So basically I was saying you could use a cpld and ram instead of the logic gates and eeprom, that would allow making buffered ram and also interrupting on arbitrary adresses/conditions (for example adding a ctrl+alt+del equivalent), keeping the data readable for the esp, banking ram etc...
The audio pin could be fun to use if you have a spare pwm pin on the microcontroller.
Das ist so gut. Vor allem das es wirklich so "einfach" geht
no idea what you talked about for the most part, but man, impressive!!
Just needs a pair of D registers to buffer the incoming / outgoing bytes and avoid the multiple reads/writes and risk of bus shorts. Also if you interrupt on the upper address bit that's only going to flip when the cart is accessed.
Wow, this is amazing. What did you use for your 3D animations? They're superb
I think it's Blender! :)
Love the animations! :)
I Like the people create new things. Thanks for share this. Never stop. The World need more creators.
"This might be one of the most useless devices I ever created." But also... THE COOLEST!!! PS: I'm not skilled enough to make one of these myself, but if you decided to manufacture them, I'd buy one just to try it on the Analogue Pocket. Probably not your wheelhouse -- you're making things for fun not for profit -- but I thought I'd throw it out there.
i always thought it would be amazing to have a cart that made a ds in to a phone, you should do one of those next ;)
Incredible video. Interesting stuff and high quality explaining. Instant sub.
Like this 3D visualisations so much!
I love this; I missed my calling because this type of hacking literally is what I WANT to do. Thanks for sharing, can’t wait to pull up the project.
If you want to do it why don't you?
@@tylermcnally8232 I continue to learn more and more - these wizards are nice to look up towards, tho.
Very interesting! How did you do the awesome PCB animations though?
Looks like Sebastian has a Blender video on it. ruclips.net/video/1Pjr0xkuyhU/видео.html
I love your explanation 4:40 (also 5:50) ... This is applicable to any process that is done at any frequency. Thanks!
I have no idea about what you were saying for 99% of the video but I found it very cool.
You've won a Subscribe from me. Wildly interesting and close to my heart in reverse engineering.
What do you use for your animations? They are gorgeous
Blender.
The Game Boy is a model I bought on CGTrader. The PCB is based on an exported 3d model from KiCad. I have once recorded the process for an earlier project (although the tedious assigning of materials is not necessary anymore): ruclips.net/video/1Pjr0xkuyhU/видео.html
@@ThereOughtaBe awesome! Just found this tutorial on your channel. Thanks so much for posting it ruclips.net/video/1Pjr0xkuyhU/видео.html
@@chochkeys Not sure though, if recording a 4 hour session of talking to myself can be called a tutorial ;)
thanks for answering the power consumption question! I was about to ask as I continued listening to the vid, and boom - you answered it!
I have been tossing around this concept for years now with the GBA and creating some online game with it, glad to see someone actually made it happen
a cartbridge to GBA with wifi and RUclips would be nice 😊
we are barely scratching that wihth thirdtube on the new 3ds
There's a Wi-Fi cartridge for the Atari 2600. Though, it's actually useful, in that, you can browse and load ROMs from the network. It's using an ESP 8266, and a STM32. Not sure why a dual core ESP32 couldn't have worked. 🤷♂️
As for the brown outs, you should add some decoupling capacitors (both ceramic and electrolytic) to help with that.
dude, this is my music account, i usually don't subscribe to accounts like this on this account, more on my main. But holy man, you deserve it, the amount of work, time, skills, and talent you put into this(and assumptively in your other videos) and you just deserve the like, subscribe and comment. Youre killing it!! keep it up!
Subscibed, liked, idk when i will see a channel like this