Make your own Gameboy Cartridge!
It may be 3 decades too late, but there are still people, myself included, who are interested in developing games for the most famous handheld gaming system in the world, the Nintendo Gameboy.
There are limitations to the design of this basic game cartridge.
- There is a limit of 32KB per game since the Gameboy can only read 32KB games without additional hardware. Any higher than 32KB and you will need a Memory Bank Controller (MBC) an additional chip that is present in game cartridges that have larger games like Pokemon or the Megaman series.
- It uses a UV EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory). UV EPROMs though cheap, are no longer manufactured. You can only get used EPROMs that more often than not have data in them hence you will need a UV EPROM eraser.
- Program and erase cycles for EPROMS can only be done a limited number of times before it becomes unreliable.
- It uses 1 sided PCB. Jumper wires are needed which means more soldering. And not just any kind of wire, thin and tiny wires that are not impossible to solder, just a lot of work. A double sided PCB can solve the jumper wire problem, but there is no practical way of making double sided PCB at home without the same amount of work.
