Exploring the Gameboy Memory Bank Controller (2020)

Bank-switching is still quite common in microcontrollers at the low end of the market, mainly 8 and 16-bit ones.

It also allowed Nintendo to have a stronger case against 3rd party companies making their own cartridges, as the nintendo logo is copyrighted

More precisely trademarked, but that eventually lead to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade which effectively stopped the practice.

Game Boy disassembler: https://github.com/mattcurrie/mgbdis

You can compile the ROM's back with rgbds: https://github.com/gbdev/rgbds

Here you can see how bank switching works.

Also, recent versions of file(1) from Unix can parse GB ROM headers too.

Rodrigo Copetti has some good in depth articles on lot of consoles over on their website. The Game Boy one is here https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/game-boy/

Old hardware and software like this has such an incredible "cool" factor. I wish my overstimulated brain weren't so burnt out I can't be transported by games like this like I was as a child.

Its amazing, how cartridge based games could extend hardware capabilities by adding their own circuits, like rumble, tilt controls, camera, even battery to save game was huge innovation. I wonder what kind of innovations from hardware side could be released today, if most games still came on huge cartridges?

> When developing a game, it was and still is important to consider the size of the final product (unless you’re Call of Duty).

:-)

it's interesting that with game cartridges not only did game developers have to write code, they also had to possibly design and manufacture circuitry for the cartridges they would ship their games on.