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Flash Equipment > I got bored and made a 'Ghetto' Gameboy Classic flash cart

#176691 - sonny_jim - Wed Sep 14, 2011 1:00 pm

Short preamble:
I found my old Gameboy classic after having a tidy up the other day, amazingly didn't have a copy of Tetris with it! Phoned up a few local game shops to find one and got told not once but twice that:
"Oh you are after Tetris? That's really rare nowadays, people tend to hold onto it"

Obviously they didn't hear about the umpteen million copies that were bundled with every single gameboy sold. Anyway, found a copy and after a little practise (TOP TIP: put the GB on a flat surface so you can stab the buttons qucker,) I finally managed to see the rocket ship take off for the first time, yay! Personal high score is 134420 :-)

After reading this artice on hackaday:
http://hackaday.com/2010/07/14/programmable-game-boy-cartridge-walk-through/

I bought a copy of Killer Instinct off ebay for ?2 and after playing it for roughly 30 seconds felt no shame in tearing the surface mount ROM out and putting in an EPROM:

[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
I didn't bother doing the solder wick/braid method to get it off, just snipped it off with my sidecutters and used a desoldering pump + IPA to give it a clean. In true Ghetto fashion the wire came from an old IDE cable I had kicking around and used Araldite to hold it all together :-)

I then made this little fellow:
[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
The DIP switches send VCC to A18-A16 on the eprom so I can hold more than one rom and switch between them.

Here's a pic of it assembled, it's a little grubby as I spilt a bit of glue on it and tried to rub it off with dirty hands before it set:
[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]

For the "Mark II Ghetto cart" I'm going to use a DKC as a donor, as that'll give me RAM and a battery so I can store stuff persistently across reboots. I'm also going to use a ZIF socket and mount the DIP switches on the cart itself, as I can only just barely fit the eproms in my eraser now!
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Would that be the internet driver for the program?