With most of my projects I try to post pretty early in the process so its easy to follow along as I go. With the Gameboy SAO, when I decided to really go for it I kind of thought I was going to keep it a secret. I decided that was a little silly.
What makes the Gameboy SAO special?
It’s an SAO that looks like a Gameboy! And if I put together the firmware right, it’ll be a programmable SAO that looks like a Gameboy. When I looked back at the MacSAO, I was kind of impressed with former me. It’s a pretty cool little device. A programmable Micro Mac! I don’t remember when I decided that the Gameboy would be the next thing I did, but after playing around with a display I thought I could make it work.
So it’s programmable?
Yes. At least it’s going to be. Right now I have some simple commands and some sprites in place that you can play with. The two big things I want to provide are this: Allow users to animate scenes with preloaded sprites, and allow users to create and upload their own sprites.
Hardware
Like the MacSAO, I’m using the CH32V003. This was in part because I spent a lot of time with it last year, and in part because it’s cheap.
Originally with the display, I thought I was going to do another OLED. To get the color effects, I toyed with the idea of putting a green or yellow tinted gel infront of the white OLED. But I couldn’t find an OLED display that fit what I was trying to do. Instead I ended up with these common 0.85″ TFT LCD displays. They are 128×128 pixels, and driven by the GC9107 chipset.
In retrospect, I would have preferred to use something with a built-in display memory, so I could lean on that a bit more instead of the paltry 2k of memory that the CH32V003 has. Still, I have gotten the basics working and it looks very promising:
I’m excited to have this for Supercon this year. I have the boards and parts on order, and they should be coming in the next 2 weeks. In terms of the hardware, it’s down to the wire – so if the board doesn’t work for some reason I’ll have to order them rush.