wifi-game-boy-cartridge

A WiFi cartridge for the original Game Boy.

This open source and open hardware Game Boy cartridge uses an ESP8266 to allow WiFi access for custom Game Boy code. First demos include accessing Wikipedia articles from the Game Boy.

Details and instructions can be found on https://there.oughta.be/a/wifi-game-boy-cartridge and an overview is given in the following video:

If you have pull-requests, bug reports or want to contribute new case designs, please do not hesitate to open an issue. For generic discussions, "show and tell" and if you are looking for support for something that is not a problem in the code here, I would recommend r/thereoughtabe on reddit.

License

The code and the PCB design are released under the GNU General Public Licence 3. The only exception is the cartridge model for the 3d print, which is based on a Game Boy cartridge by DomesticHacks on Thingiverse, which is released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license, so I have to publish my derived work under CC-BY-NC-SA, too.

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Comments

Power instabilities
The problem has two sides:

When I turn on the Game Boy, the Nintendo logo is often surrounded by glitches that form a repeating pattern along the tile grid. I think this is due to a voltage drop as the ESP starts while the Game Boys voltage supply is not entirely stabilized, corrupting some of its memory. I think that this would require delaying either the start of the ESP or the Game Boy (via Reset pin?), but this problem is mostly cosmetic as I do not see any problems later and the glitches disappear after the logo screen.

If the battery voltage is a bit too low (and I am talking about something like 1.48 V per battery), the ESP does not boot reliably. If it is even lower (especially with NiMh batteries), I cannot get the ESP to boot at all. I have not yet measured the actual voltage at the cartridge at this point (yeah, it's a matter of seconds, but I do not have the Game Boy at hand right now - I will do this later), but I think that I underestimated how much the 5V from the Game Boy actually depend on the source voltage and that the dropout voltage of the NCP1117 is just too high to sustain a proper voltage for the ESP in that case. After a quick search I now ordered a few AP7361C-33ER as a pin-compatible replacement with lower drop-out voltage.
opened by Staacks 5