kottke.org posts about Game Boy
This is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen.
If you’re familiar with e-paper, you know that they normally refresh much slower (2-3 times a second), not nearly quick enough to play even a simple video game. This guy wrote his own display driver that got the refresh rate up to 30 times per second. From the transcript of the video explaining how e-paper works and how he hacked the display to make it play games:
Unlike conventional displays like LCD or OLED, ePaper stores its image physically using charged black and white pigment particles. By changing the electric field, the display moves the pigments towards or away from the surface, which in the end gives us black- or white-looking pixel. And usually a sequence of several electrical pulses called a waveform is needed to move the pigment back and forth, before finally driving it towards the new image. This helps produce a clean result without leaving too much of the previous image behind. But this takes a lot of time.
The project is open source — you can get the plans and code on GitHub. This engineer was inspired by Wenting Zhang’s e-paper Game Boy emulator:
Zhang has also made a color e-ink display that runs at 60 fps. Very cool. (via yanko design)
Lego is coming out with a near 1:1 replica of Nintendo’s iconic Game Boy handheld video game system. It’s not playable, but you can insert & remove Lego game cartridges and use different lenticular screens to pretend. Here’s a short video showing how it “works”:
You can preorder the kit from Amazon; the price is $60, which is only $30 less than the actual Game Boy cost when it was released.1
I still have my original Game Boy from 1989 — it’s sitting on a table near where I’m typing this. I played so so much Tetris on that thing… (via moss & fog)
Here’s a thing I just found out about: protective iPhone cases that are also playable Game Boy-style handheld gaming console. Here are a bunch of different ones on Amazon for different phones in a variety of colors that come preloaded with games.
Buyer beware on these though — the reviews are just ok, many of them likely don’t come with actual NES or Game Boy games, and who knows if they’ll actually protect your phone? The CaseBoy claims to come preloaded with games like Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, Tetris, Galaga, Contra, and the like, but it seems unlikely that Nintendo (or anyone else) licensed these games to them. The Verge panned one of the cases in this review (so did MacWorld).
I scrolled to “E” to find the Frogger knock-off, in which I maneuvered a single block through rows of moving bricks. The letter “D” let me play a Galaga clone, although I had to imagine the missiles since they didn’t show up on screen. Games I-Z are all variants on Tetris, ranging from the standard tile-matching puzzler to one that made the stack of blocks move to the right every few seconds.
As for its actual effectiveness as a case? It depends.
Fun idea though! Has anyone used one of these? I’m tempted to order one just to see how bad/good it is.
Neat. Tetris on the Game Boy is still like a comfy chair after all these years. Runs best in Google Chrome. See also the Javascript Nintendo emulator.
I am kind of in love with this photo.
The Game Boy just turned 20; here are six reasons why it was so successful. Surprisingly, the list is not:
1. Tetris
2. Tetris
3. Tetris
4. Tetris
5. Tetris
6. Tetris
Tetris didn’t start with the Game Boy, of course (Pajitnov created it for the PC in 1985), but the Game Boy made it mainstream. Ultimately, Tetris proved so popular that it quickly drove sales of Nintendo’s handheld console into the millions. Tetris’s grown-up gameplay also attracted adults to Nintendo’s new platform, expanding Game Boy’s potential audience beyond the usual adolescent NES set.
Somewhere, I still have an original Game Boy with a Tetris cart wedged into it.
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