The first battery-free Game Boy wants to power a gaming revolution

For the first time in like 20 years I played on a Game Boy just a couple of months ago after finding my old box with handhelds (also had quite some Game&Watch titles, but who has LR44 batteries these days..). Still fun. Unfortunately my 'Game Boy Oscilloscope' cartridge was missing, that was a pretty cool thing actually. Reminder of an era when things were different, but not necessarily worse. Probably I'll think the same of this decade 20 years in the future, but it's sometimes easy to foget how fast things can advance and holding an older piece of hardware always reminds me of that.

More on topic: the comment wrt batteries in the article is spot on. So common, yet so many problems with it. For that exact reason we have a kitchen scale driven by a small dynamo for generating power. No more empty batteries right when you need it. No more despair when the batteries it needs are not the type you have lying around. No more auto-off in the middle of weighing (cannot believe how many scales are plagued by that - or did I just get unlucky?). Just spin the wheel a couple of times and it goes on for minutes. Really hoping the thing lasts a lifetime; that's a good general rule for how tools should be actually: do one thing, do it good, and last forever.

Anyway: too bad this isn't up for sale, would make a nice gift for instance. But good to see there's still R&D being done in the direction of not requiring batteries, combining a couple of sources is perhaps the novelty here.

Nothing is said about the hardware (which will be posted Sept 12), but I wonder what processor they're using. There have been a lot of advances in lower power processors over these last years.

I was once at a conference where Atmel was demoing their SAM L21 board by transmitting FM radio to a nearby radio receiver using the heat generated by your hand.

I went home and purchased a board and found it amazing. 48 MHz ARM Cortex-M0+ that consumed < 35µA/MHz [0]. You could run an IOT device for years on a coin cell!

Recently someone on HN mentioned the Ambiq Apollo3, which is even more incredible with up to 96MHz and less than 6 (yes, SIX) µA/MHz. [1]. Absolutely mind blowing.

That said, the biggest reason why I think new processors aren't used often is their support/documentation. AVR processors are pretty bad in a lot of ways (cost, performance, power consumption, etc) but you'll be hard pressed to find a problem which hasn't already been solved by the millions of Arduino users. Good luck troubleshooting your obscure interrupt issues with that one Microchip processor that only 10 people use.

[0]: https://www.microchip.com/design-centers/32-bit/sam-32-bit-m...

[1]: https://www.fujitsu.com/uk/about/resources/news/press-releas...

> The team didn't trial the 1,000-plus titles released for the Game Boy, but some of the biggest titles -- like Pokemon Blue -- have "sadistically huge" memory and don't require constant button pressing. That's a problem.

I'm curious if the emulator the authors are using loads the entire ROM into the computer's memory before running. The Game Boy traditionally has a 16-bit address space; games that had a larger amount of data would include specialized hardware that allowed addresses 0x4000-0x7FFF to be re-assignable. [1][2] Tetris or Tobu Tobu Girl [3] fit inside the initial space without swapping, meanwhile something larger like Zelda switches banks.

[1] https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Memory_Bank_Controllers

[2] https://gbdev.gg8.se/wiki/articles/Memory_Map

[3] https://tangramgames.dk/tobutobugirl/

>Beside the absence of a battery slot on the back, the device looks exactly like Nintendo's revolutionary handheld.

Does it?

I found this really interesting to read. It's really cool that they use the mechanical press of the buttons to generate energy. I had never thought of that before. However when you think about those old longpress ratchet flashlights - that was the same concept.

I wonder if harvesting energy from ambient radio waves would help ... or is that type of energy harvesting philosophically off-limits to the project, as you're just offloading the carbon footprint / energy source down the line?

Hopefully they can figure out how to make this work with sound!