I don’t know why they changed, but both cart styles are really common. It seemed to me that the old ones were solid like the second image, and the newer games switched to the recessed one. IIRC, the newer games also stopped coming with the connector cover… maybe related, maybe not.
VBSAM wrote:
Epic collection. I bet the electric bill is epic as well! Nice work.
Heh, well… they’re all on only during a party… otherwise I only turn the ones on that I’m playing. But with the entire arcade on, it only costs about $1 per hour, plus the extra cooling (or minus the heating in the winter 😉 ).
Deadly-D wrote:
That really is AWESOME!!!!!!! DogP, when you gonna fly us all too your house to have a game night? 😛
If you’re ever in the DC area, you’re welcome to stop by and play some games. I don’t think I can fly everyone out here though… at least not until we get that teleporter technology figured out 😉 .
Zubari95 wrote:
I dunno maybe its cuz my Virtual Boy is brand new and unopened that it works great. I dunno what happens to other Virtual Boys.
I don’t think the cable problem has anything to do with new or used… it’d be pretty hard to damage the cable connection from abuse, since the cable is so light and well shaped, and everything with much mass is rigidly secured to the case. The worst thing you could do would be to play with the IPD adjustment a lot (or leave it at the maximum inward position).
If you want to see another display cable from a BRAND NEW VB… check this out: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=10333#forumpost10333 . I also had another brand new one with problems, though the cable physically looked fine (I think that problem was caused by the stress of the IPD being adjusted inward during storage).
e5frog wrote:
Yes as DogP writes the pin 4 is selection pin for expansion area /ES – and there’s the magic pin to use another 128Mbits – apparently.
You can use 3.3V chips (and those of other voltages) if you use level converters – you will actually have to when the 5V chips become increasingly harder to find.
A solution with an SD-card would be the ultimate solution. It will have it’s limitations of course. If it has a limited SRAM that holds the whole ROM for normal parallel usage the size of this will limit the maximum size of the cart – however, as has been mentioned before, none of the commercial games are more than 16Mbit (2MByte).
If we want to open up for larger homebrews perhaps it would be nice to be able to use the extreme capacities of the VB. Running directly towards the SD card sounds like an interesting method…
Looking at the title of the thread I’m a little surprised it ended up here. 😉
You actually can have 384mbit of memory on the cart… 128mbit for each address space available. There’s the ROM area, Battery backed RAM area, and Expansion area 🙂 . There’s not really anything special about any of these memory spaces though… you can put anything anywhere you want (the only special part is the interrupt vectors pointing to the ROM area). And if for some crazy reason you need MORE, you could bank the memory… but that seems very unnecessary.
And yeah, you’re definitely not gonna run directly from an SD card… you have 150ns to get the address requested, request that from the SD card, clock out the page from SD, and put the data on the parallel bus. SD cards can only be clocked at ~25MHz, and with the 1 bit SPI mode, that’s MUCH too slow.
I designed a cart that would boot from Compact Flash, then load a standard parallel flash, but I never got around to finishing it… it was kinda a mess anyway.
I do have something pretty cool that I’ve been playing with on and off for a long time… maybe I’ll post some pics one of these days. I doubt it’ll ever go to production, but it’s cool anyway.
LOL! I hope you’re kidding. I mean… seriously? There’s lots of “intermittent” problems, and being patient isn’t the solution. When your car only starts every now and then, do you just wait until tomorrow, when the temperature/moisture will be different, which may fix whatever problem exists? And if not, maybe the next day? What happens when it finally does start, then you get to where you’re going and it doesn’t start again?
Or… when the TV only works when you smack the side of it… is the solution to just smack the side of it, or get a mechanical hand with remote control to smack it (so you can do it from the couch 😛 )?
These displays don’t “fix” themselves (and they’re definitely not “sick” or self-healing)… they intermittently work, which means they also intermittently don’t work. If you’re fine with having a VB that works only when it feels like it, and will progressively get worse, then feel free to be “patient”. For everyone else, I recommend actually repairing the displays.
Heh, no… this screen is MUCH worse than the original Gameboy (I played them side by side a few years ago to make sure it wasn’t that I was spoiled by new hardware). The spinach display is still perfectly playable… even if it is kinda ugly. And I also have the Pocket Pro, and the screen isn’t any better (at least not noticeably).
I’ve got one… not too bad, except the LCD sucked. I helped hack it a little bit a few years ago. Heh, the game.commies site is still up: http://gamecom.guruwork.de/ .
That looks like a broken normal stand 😛 . Your plastic piece w/ the Nintendo logo, “Made in Japan” and “Pat. Pend.” has a big chunk taken out of the top of it, which lets the legs come through the top (not supposed to happen). That’s the same as a regular stand, except a normal one has plastic all the way around the top, keeping the legs inside.
Nice… glad you got it working. For lubricating the IPD, IIRC they used a white lithium grease… you could probably use the same. IIRC it’s all plastic, so you should make sure it’s plastic safe.
Does he still repair them though? IIRC he posted a while back that he wasn’t doing it anymore (temporarily, or maybe until further notice). Looking at his repair status, it looks like he hasn’t done anything since February (and that was a Saturn).
I think he’s laughing because the wire is a kinda big. It’d be pretty tough to get anything besides 30AWG or smaller (since you need 30 wires in that tight space).
Yeah, I hate to see how many broken machines there are, when it’s not that difficult to repair. I keep thinking about doing a free/cheap bulk repair day, where you pay shipping and get it to me by a certain date, and I’d repair a whole bunch at once… just to help out the community. I don’t like fixing one at a time, because it takes some prep to get things in order for the repair… and the other thing I hate are the screws (I’d probably grab some phillips screws to put back in). But, I just don’t have the free time right now to do any of that.
Really? I haven’t bought a VB system in YEARS (I’ve got ~15, so it’ll be a while before I need another 😉 )… but I figured a non-working one would be pretty worthless (<$10), and a working one would go for a little more ($25), but one that was advertised as permanently fixed would go for quite a bit more than that ($50+). I know a lot of people are willing to pay a decent amount to get their own system fixed ($50+)... I figured a fixed VB would go for at least the cost of the repair. But I really don't have the time/interest to repair them for others, so it's not for me.
The number of buyers of repaired VBs may be small, so you might have to sit on them for a while... offering them at a set price, but I'd guess you'd find buyers eventually. When people want theirs repaired, and look at the price of two-way shipping to get their own repaired, or just buy one w/ one-way shipping, and they get to keep their broken one... they'll probably make the right decision.
But no, I don't think VBs are good investments 😉 .
DogP
I wouldn’t use hot air for this. I’ve destroyed a couple VB displays w/ hot air… it’s too easy to overheat the IC. And really, you can’t roll the solder ball around with hot air like you can by dragging the solder w/ an iron.
You really need to expose the copper from the cable more than anything, which the hot solder ball does. I personally like using NaOH to expose the copper, then it’s just a matter of soldering the cable to the PCB, but as mbuchman’s video shows… it’s definitely possible without.
