I spent a good chunk of today sorting through all the electronics stuff piled on
my bench in preparation for the great move. I've got probably over 3/4 of my
components organised now in a hierarchical system of zip-lock bags which should
make it easy to transport in a suitcase. I'm also building up a pile of stuff
to donate to the local hackerspace.
While sorting, I found my sibling's and my childhood GameBoy. It's one of the
later models which came with a transparent case, so you can see some of the PCB,
which is neat. I brought this home the last time I visited my parents back in
Australia. The original GameBoy has a CPU very similar to the Z80, and since my
homebrew Z80 computer project was in full swing at that time I thought I'd take
it back to NZ with me and try to find a way to run my own code on it. I put
some fresh batteries in and to my dismay it failed to power up. So I set it
aside and resolved to try to fix it someday. Now, with only two weeks before I
have to leave and my having spent exactly zero hours trying to fix it, I
wondered if I should simply abandon it. But I have such happy memories of
playing on this GameBoy with my siblings on long car trips that I was really
reluctant to do so. Not expecting much, I put some batteries in today and to my
surprise it fired right up! So I'll take it to Finland with me and see if I can
do something neat with it. I really like the idea of still getting some fun out
of this machine as an adult.
I have no game cartridges for it, but I do have Game Link Cable, which after
some quick research seems to carry what looks a lot like 5V SPI, with serial data
in/out and clock lines as well as GND and a +5V supply. So it might be possible
to interface the GameBoy with an AVR microcontroller, which opens up lots of
possibilities. Apparently people have also used it to connect PS/2 keyboards to
the Gameboy - perhaps I could make a very unusual terminal for my Z80 machine?
