GB Interceptor Enables Live Screen Capture From Game Boy

[Sebastian] had a tricky trouble to address. Competition in a Tetris match necessary to stream movie of their Video game Boy screens, but no resolution conveniently existed. For factors of fairness, emulators were being proper out, and no modifications could be made to the Activity Boys, possibly. Thus, [Sebastian] created the GB Interceptor, a Match Boy seize cartridge.

Thanks to the design and style of the Match Boy, there is a great deal of accessibility to practical signals by way of the cartridge port alone. [Sebastian] understood that a non-invasive capture gadget could be crafted to sit in-in between the Game Boy and a cart, and mail video clip to a personal computer. Unfortunately, there’s no direct entry to the movie RAM by way of this port, but [Sebastian] figured out a nifty workaround.

The establish takes advantage of a Raspberry Pi Pico. The chip’s two cores emulate the Match Boy’s CPU and Picture Processing Device, respectively. Undertaking this, though acquiring the chips preserve up with what’s heading on in the Game Boy, required overclocking the Pico to 225 MHz. The technique performs by capturing information from the cartridge’s memory bus, and follows alongside with the recommendations getting run by the Match Boy. By performing this, the Pico is ready to populate its individual duplicate of the online video RAM. It then spits this out more than USB, exactly where it can be displayed and streamed on the net as wanted.

There are some edge-case constraints, but for its meant reason, the method will work fantastic. At present, the components is usable on Linux and Windows, although it does need some fiddling in the latter case. Information are on Github for these eager to build their very own. If you simply just want to dump carts rather than stream from your Sport Boy, we can aid there, far too. Video clip just after the crack.

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