Hey i was doing some reading and i found out that you can actually mod a super gameboy cartridge and add a link cable port. i also read that the only extra chip from the super gameboy (compared to a regular gameboy) is a chip that grabs video and button input. would it be possible to gut a gameboy color and solder on all the stuff to the super gameboy cart and convert it to a super gameboy color?
or are the gameboy and gameboy color systems far too differnt? just a thought figured i'd ask?
The video output from the DMG is just a 2bpp stream, and a full frame of that data is only 160×144×2÷8=5760 bytes. The Super Gameboy works by using the SNES's DMA to copy those 6KB of data into the SNES's PPU.
However, the GBC emits a 15bpp stream, requiring eight times as much data to be transfered, and the SNES can't keep up.
thanks for the info glad i didnt try this on my own !
That's why Nintendo waited until the GameCube era to make something like this, as its "high-speed port" is fast enough to pass GBC or GBA full-color output.
tepples wrote:
That's why Nintendo waited until the GameCube era to make something like this, as its "high-speed port" is fast enough to pass GBC or GBA full-color output.
N64 era. There are CGB and GBA WideBoy64s.
Yet they weren't produced in quantity. Was there some limit of the N64 cart bus preventing this? Frame rate problems? Or was it just Nintendo being a dog in the manger?
tepples wrote:
Was there some limit of the N64 cart bus preventing this?
Well, he just gave an example. :/ The amount of them has nothing to do with if they actually work. I find it incredibly hard to believe that the N64 can't stream 4x the amount of data as the SNES.
Anyway though, Would it be possible to actually just use the SNES's video hardware to emulate the GBC's instead of just sending a pre competed image? Oh, wait, the GBC has 32 palettes, 16 for sprites and 16 for BGs, doesn't it... I was about to suggest that you'd just use half of the bits for sprites, and use a 2bpp BG layer, but then I also remembered that color 0 on each BG palette is a unique color. At least with the BG though, you can layer 2 2bpp layers on top of each other, with one of the layers having tiles being a solid color (presumably any regular tile, just with all 4 entries in the palette being the same). Actually, you could still have the GBC BG layer on the SNES if you use all 4 2bpp layers in mode 0: have 2 BG layers, each for 8 palettes, and have the other 2 BG layers be the palettes of color 0. I'm still at a loss with sprites though, unless you want to have a "copy" of every 2bpp sprite graphic so that you can use the top 8 colors as an extra palette. I'm not sure how feasible this would be though. The BG should be fine though.
GBC has 8 palettes for backgrounds and 8 palettes for sprites, just like the Super NES. BUT: Color 0 of each background palette is significant, unlike the Super NES where only the first background palette's color 0 is ever used. And there's CHR HDMA to quickly move data from ROM or RAM to VRAM. And a lot of games rewrite background palettes during draw time.
tepples wrote:
GBC has 8 palettes for backgrounds and 8 palettes for sprites, just like the Super NES. BUT: Color 0 of each background palette is significant, unlike the Super NES where only the first background palette's color 0 is ever used.
Well, like I was saying, just have it to were there are 2 2bpp BG layers, one with solid tiles that goes behind the regular one. Just thinking, you would actually need to have an extra solid tile somewhere in vram. I doubt the GBC will use it all.
tepples wrote:
And there's CHR HDMA to quickly move data from ROM or RAM to VRAM. And a lot of games rewrite background palettes during draw time.
How much data can you change each scanline?
Espozo wrote:
Well, like I was saying, just have it to were there are 2 2bpp BG layers, one with solid tiles that goes behind the regular one.
It would take all four layers (background color 0, window color 0, background, window), leaving no room for a border.
Espozo wrote:
tepples wrote:
And there's CHR HDMA to quickly move data from ROM or RAM to VRAM. And a lot of games rewrite background palettes during draw time.
How much data can you change each scanline?
HDMA on GBC copies 16 bytes after each of up to 144 scanlines.
tepples wrote:
window
Wait, what?
tepples wrote:
HDMA on GBC copies 16 bytes after each of up to 144 scanlines.
Well, then that's perfect, isn't it?
tepples wrote:
leaving no room for a border.
I didn't really expect to have enough resources for a border...
Actually, wait, why not just make a border with sprites? This whole thing will probably be more limited than the regular Super Gameboy, but that's what I was expecting.
There are very few games programmed to properly support both GBC and SGB mode simultaneously. Some games go to color, but then restrict the graphics quality because it's a SGB. I've heard of one game that properly supports SGB and GBC mode at the same time (full color, then changes the border periodically).
I just wish I could play my pokemon games in full color
Why not get a used gamecube and gameboy player?
lidnariq wrote:
Why not get a used gamecube and gameboy player?
I considered doing this, but optical drives have the annoying tendency to fail, and considering how old the GameCube is, I wouldn't expect a used one to last very long. If only you didn't need to use a disc in order to boot the Game Boy hardware...
That and the Game Boy Player boot disc doesn't support 240p without
hacks that may be hard to get past certain countries' customs, and most GameCube consoles don't support 480p. So you're left with blurry 480i.
gcforever wiki:Using a Wii drive replacement on a GameCube.
I'm really not interested in arguing whether it's ethical, legal, or anything else. I just don't think think "Wah, optical drive" is a useful retort.
tokumaru wrote:
I considered doing this, but optical drives have the annoying tendency to fail, and considering how old the GameCube is, I wouldn't expect a used one to last very long.
Isn't it literally just a little electric motor that spins in one direction... It's not like the motor of a toy car that has strain placed upon it. The GameCube is built like a tank anyway, and out of the three GameCube's I have, they all work like a charm. I hadn't even considered them breaking at any point. I think the most legitimate concern is the fact that the Gameboy Player seems to downgrade picture quality, but it seems that you can get a different rom to run it and it looks just fine. I'm not exactly sure how you'd get this rom on a GameCube disk though... Would there be some kind of way to burn information onto a disk using the Wii's GameCube disk drive? (It's easy to run custom software on it via the homebrew channel for this, if the software exists.) I've never really understood how burning a disk works.
Alcohol + Microfiber cloth, and wipe very very gently, that's how you make a gamecube that has stopped reading discs correctly work again. The laser lens area is exposed when you lift the lid, so you don't need to open up the system or anything.
You mean to tell me most of the problems with disk drives come from the laser being scratched? I don't even understand how that could ever happen under normal circumstances... (The lid is closed 90% of the time, so nothing can even come into contact with the laser.) I was always led to believe that it was from the motor failing, which still seems fairly improbable, especially in only about 10 years with no strain on it whatsoever.
I've always heard about alignment issues or something. I didn't have contact with many disc-based consoles beside the PSX and the PS2, but both would often have problems reading discs after a while. Why would the GameCube's optical drive be better than the typical drive?
(Guessing)
The GameCube reads mini-DVD-like media, which means the motor moving the laser assembly doesn't have to move as far and thus wouldn't wear out as fast. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do the dual layer thing either.
Nintendo also just tends to be pretty good about building their stuff to last in a way that Sony generally isn't.
tepples wrote:
(Guessing)
The GameCube reads mini-DVD-like media, which means the motor moving the laser assembly doesn't have to move as far and thus wouldn't wear out as fast. As far as I can tell, it doesn't do the dual layer thing either.
That's right, no GameCube game ever used a dual-layer disc. With the multi-disc games that exist we can assume that it was not capable of supporting them.
I don't think the GC has a reputation for breaking down. Ofcourse anything can be broken by a careless or abusive user.
Well I'm currently broke and probably going to be broke for a while... so! If anyone wants to gift me a gamecube+gbplayer+disk I'll happily accept it lol
Well, the cheapest GameCube I found with all the cables and a controller was $40 (Even more expensive than the cheapest Wii I found.
), and I found the Gameboy Player with the disk for $50, with the actual expansion on the console going by itself for $15 (The disk is where most of the cost comes from). If you were able to somehow burn Gamecube games, you could find the rom for the Gameboy Player (or even the improved one) and burn it onto the disk of some cheap crap game. I don't know feasible this would be though and it might be cheaper to just buy the regular disk. (although the modifications people have made to the rom certainly make it look a lot better, getting rid of the blurriness.) At worst, you're looking at about $90.
MottZilla wrote:
Ofcourse anything can be broken by a careless or abusive user.
I've even heard some crazy stories of GameCube's surviving what would break just about any other console. This one kid told me his brother went crazy and threw it out the second story window by its lunchbox handle, and it still miraculously worked, although I can't imagine it looked to good. I don't know if this is true, but I did trip over the controller wire while my sister was playing a game and had the GameCube slam into wall (It was on the edge of the table, next to a wall. It fell of the table and hit the wall) and it still worked perfectly, (and isn't made out of stupid shiny plastic so it also still looked perfect) so it's at least that strong.
MottZilla wrote:
dual-layer disc.
What does this mean? I this isn't a double sided disk?
One random thing I was thinking of was that I've never understood the hate for the Gamecube's tiny disks, other than the fact that the Gamecube couldn't play DVDs although we always had a DVD player so that doesn't matter. People just always like to act like it's some sort of serious technical flaw even though you can just simply switch the disks and it acts just fine, as all the information is just dumped onto ram and stays there until it needs to be changed. (Some games I've played will even work fine without the disks in for a majority of the game.) One thing people seem to forget is that load times are often best on the GameCube vs. the PS2 and the Xbox, I think because of faster access times of something, which is also something that could potentially be useful even outside of loading, like rapidly changing graphics to try and avoid something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34sU5DVIGMM#t=1m52s
Espozo wrote:
[Dual-layer] isn't a double sided disk?
wikipedia:DVD#Dual-layer recording.
TL;DR: Two planes of data one above the other, laser can see one or the other by focusing differently.
Espozo wrote:
If you were able to somehow burn Gamecube games
The GameCube can run games burnt on mini DVD-Rs if you install a modchip.
Quote:
burn it onto the disk of some cheap crap game.
What? This is not how DVD burning works, you can't overwrite a pressed DVD, or even a DVD-R. You need a blank DVD-R.
If you can run homebrew programs then you don't need the GB Player Startup Disc. Either a modchip, Action Replay, or other method of running homebrew programs is nice to have anyway as I think on most if not all GameCube consoles you can then load DVD-Rs. Although you have to use those "mini" dvd-rs.
tokumaru wrote:
What? This is not how DVD burning works, you can't overwrite a pressed DVD, or even a DVD-R. You need a blank DVD-R.
I'm stupid...
I guess if you do burn a DVD, you can't overwrite the data in any way, in that whatever is burned onto the DVD is permanent? I really don't understand how CD technology works...
tokumaru wrote:
The GameCube can run games burnt on mini DVD-Rs if you install a modchip.
Is this mini DVD-R technology different than what the GameCube normally uses? Is it next to impossible to find blank GameCube disks and a GameCube disk burner? Yeah, I don't have a clue what I'm talking about...
The
differences between standard DVD format and GameCube/Wii disc format are six "pinholes" in the lead-in, whose location is encoded in the Burst Cutting Area, and a modification of the parameters used for sector whitening. Wii also has 3% of disc space used by sector hashes.
Espozo wrote:
I guess if you do burn a DVD, you can't overwrite the data in any way, in that whatever is burned onto the DVD is permanent?
The basic idea behind reading optical media is that a laser is fired at the disc, and depending on whether the laser reflects back, that part of the disc is considered a 1 or a 0. Retail discs are pressed from a master (they're not burned at all), and contain pits that deflect the laser away from the reading sensor. Recordable discs are in fact burned, and the burned spots become opaque and stop reflecting the laser, so these spots have the same effect as the pits in a pressed disc, as far as the reader is concerned. Rewritable media is more complex, it's made of a material that can change states multiple times.
tokumaru wrote:
Is this mini DVD-R technology different than what the GameCube normally uses?
Physically, the difference is that GameCube discs are pressed, and DVD-R is burned. In addition to that, there appears to be differences in the protocol, according to the page tepples linked to. I do know that the protection can be circumvented though, because there are people running games off of mini DVD-Rs.
tokumaru wrote:
The basic idea behind reading optical media is that a laser is fired at the disc, and depending on whether the laser reflects back, that part of the disc is considered a 1 or a 0.
It almost seems like a miracle that they are that reliable in that regard. I've never quite understood as to how programs never catastrophically fail from reading off of something as seemingly unreliable as that. (Just one bit could mean either jumping back to the start of a loop or running off into nowhere...)
Like you said though, the fact that if it's pressed or burned is irrelevant, so it all comes down to this protocol thing. If you bought new DVD to be burned, would the area for protocol be blank or would it already be filled out, because in that case, you're out of luck...
Woah nellie, before long you're going to be denying that computers could possibly work.
Espozo wrote:
Just one bit could mean either jumping back to the start of a loop or running off into nowhere...
Well, it's not like these 0s and 1s are raw data... Here's what
Wikipedia says about CDs:
Quote:
The pits and lands themselves do not directly represent the zeros and ones of binary data. Instead, non-return-to-zero, inverted encoding is used: a change from pit to land or land to pit indicates a one, while no change indicates a series of zeros. There must be at least two and no more than ten zeros between each one, which is defined by the length of the pit. This in turn is decoded by reversing the eight-to-fourteen modulation used in mastering the disc, and then reversing the cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding, finally revealing the raw data stored on the disc.
I have no idea what most of that means, but it's clear that the data goes through a lot of transformations so it can be read from the disc more reliably.
Espozo wrote:
I've never quite understood as to how programs never catastrophically fail from reading off of something as seemingly unreliable as that.
It's called Reed-Solomon coding. If some bytes are illegible, the drive's controller does various polynomial voodoo in a finite field to guess the missing bytes. The same principle is used in 2D barcodes such as QR codes.
tokumaru wrote:
Espozo wrote:
Just one bit could mean either jumping back to the start of a loop or running off into nowhere...
Well, it's not like these 0s and 1s are raw data... Here's what
Wikipedia says about CDs:
Quote:
The pits and lands themselves do not directly represent the zeros and ones of binary data. Instead, non-return-to-zero, inverted encoding is used: a change from pit to land or land to pit indicates a one, while no change indicates a series of zeros. There must be at least two and no more than ten zeros between each one, which is defined by the length of the pit. This in turn is decoded by reversing the eight-to-fourteen modulation used in mastering the disc, and then reversing the cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding, finally revealing the raw data stored on the disc.
I have no idea what most of that means, but it's clear that the data goes through a lot of transformations so it can be read from the disc more reliably.
In short, from memory, each pit / opaque spot on a disc indicates an XOR with the previous bit state. That's what I remember from my A+ class form six years ago.
tokumaru wrote:
I do know that the protection can be circumvented though, because there are people running games off of mini DVD-Rs.
Most GameCube consoles via software can affect the DVD drive controller to enable a standard DVD reading mode. I think later ones and all Wii consoles cannot do this via software anymore but there is a hardware (modchip) method of basically doing the same thing to enable reading standard DVDs.
Prior to this the GameCube actually had an interesting piece of software using Phantasy Star Online and the Broadband Adapter that allowed you to stream ISO images over your network to your GameCube. The only problem is the transfer rate or the method of transferring data did not work well with audio and video streams in many games.
MottZilla wrote:
I think later ones and all Wii consoles cannot do this via software anymore but there is a hardware (modchip) method of basically doing the same thing to enable reading standard DVDs.
I believe older Wiis allowed this, as there used to be a piece of homebrew called DVDX that installed a hidden channel enabling DVD Video commands to be sent to the drive. This was supplanted by a later release of Homebrew Channel, which incorporated the ability to do this (via the HW_AHBPROT flag) internally. Newer Wiis have drive firmware that will not read from any disc that is not an official Nintendo optical disc (GC or Wii) without a drivechip mod.
tokumaru wrote:
lidnariq wrote:
Why not get a used gamecube and gameboy player?
I considered doing this, but optical drives have the annoying tendency to fail, and considering how old the GameCube is, I wouldn't expect a used one to last very long. If only you didn't need to use a disc in order to boot the Game Boy hardware...
Old topic, but this info wasn't mentioned in it so far, so:
There exists a GC drive replacement that takes SD cards. It was developed after the Wii had already come out, and mainly used for piracy of course, but if you're worried about the optical drive flaking out, try finding one of those. I forget what it was called though.
It was rather simple to install too IIRC, no soldering.
Oh, to the OP, there exist various third-party Gameboy players for many consoles. Here's one for SNES that can play GBA:
http://www.tototek.com/store/index.php? ... cts_id=168Doesn't mention GBC support though.
tokumaru wrote:
lidnariq wrote:
Why not get a used gamecube and gameboy player?
I considered doing this, but optical drives have the annoying tendency to fail, and considering how old the GameCube is, I wouldn't expect a used one to last very long. If only you didn't need to use a disc in order to boot the Game Boy hardware...
The GBP disc is also "strangely rare" and therefore expensive.
Quote:
The GBP disc is also "strangely rare" and therefore expensive.
That problem should at least be solvable with an SD Media Launcher.
For that matter, if you're using a modchip or Datel Media Launcher, there is no reason to use the GBP disc: GBI is better in pretty much every respect. Lower latency and native 240p support. All versions support using a GBA as a controller.
There are three builds:
ULL: Tries to very closely match the GBA refresh rate, and has essentially zero lag. Unfortunately many displays/upscalers either won't sync with this, or show monochrome, and occasional tearing will happen on all displays when the GBA and GC drift out of sync. But, 240p/480p output and no lag is reaaaally nice.
LL: A bit less of a close match to the GBA native refresh rate. More compatible, and solves the tearing by adding a rolling framebuffer for 1-2 frames of lag. Still has 240p support (not sure about 480p).
Regular: Standard refresh rates so works on any display, supports various types of scaling/borders/networking/colour adjustments/on-screen menu/etc. but has 2-3 frames of lag at 60Hz and 1.5-2 frames of lag at 120Hz (which requires HDMI mod, IIRC).
Personally, my PVM works great with ULL, and my particular GBP/GC exhibit the tearing only relatively rarely and for a relatively short amount of time, making it a tolerable tradeoff for the reduced lag.
EDIT: But yes, the GBP is generally cheaper to buy without the disc than with, since the disc is a lot more rare than the GBP. Since I planned to use GBI from the start, that didn't concern me, and I did burn a GBP disc anyhow for the heck of it.