

Using an oscilloscope as a Gameboy display - trafficlight
http://flashingleds.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/nintendoscope/

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msarnoff
As the creator of a similar oscilloscope hack (the Terminalscope:
[http://hackaday.com/2010/02/24/oscilloscope-doubles-as-a-
ser...](http://hackaday.com/2010/02/24/oscilloscope-doubles-as-a-serial-
terminal/)) I find this very cool. If Craig is reading this, thanks for the
shout-out :)

I'm not intimately familiar with the Game Boy's video signals, but I wonder:
why the fancy microcontroller and digital-to-analog converters? The
Terminalscope just uses a couple of op-amps to generate the horizontal and
vertical sweeps. The microcontroller doesn't have to worry about moving the
beam, so the refresh rate is very high and there's no flicker.

Maybe I should try this with my old Game Boy: the LCD is starting to die
anyway...

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flashingleds
You're welcome =)

As noted in the comments of that post, I'm doing a raster display with vector
display techniques. Opamp sweeps are indeed a more sensible way of rastering,
but the internal DACs on this microcontroller are fast enough to keep up
anyway.

What's killing the refresh rate is the settling time for the (crappy) external
dac doing the 4-shade colour. Your terminal application only deals with beam
on/beam blanked so you can run it a lot faster.

By all means give it a go, it's a pretty satisfying project. I have no doubt
you can improve on my version.

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jbri
If you used an opamp sweep for one of the rastering dimensions (probably the
horizontal), wouldn't that free up one of the DACs so you could use it for the
shading?

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flashingleds
It most certainly would, and you'd probably want to do the vertical sweep as
that's the slowest.

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tptacek
The model of a good HN post. Not only does it do something interesting to
geeks, but, unlike "Star Wars On A Floppy Drive", actually takes the time to
explain how it worked. Less cat - photos - in - geek-post - clothing. More
like this.

Also, coolest thing I've seen done yet with a Salae probe. Those things are
cheap, tiny, cool looking, and make great gifts; we've given them to job
candidates before when things didn't work out.

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jkap
This is probably one of the coolest hacks I have ever seen.

Practical? Hell no. Awesome? Hell yes.

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transition
Achievement Unlocked: God of Nerds

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ajarmoniuk
Masterfuck!

