Wooden Game Boy | Hacker News Reader

Wooden Game Boy

there.oughta.be

233 points_Microft41 comments

This drills 1mm holes into the poles for the screws to tap in. As mentioned in step B03, the 1mm holes also did not work perfectly. In my opinion they are better than the 1.5mm holes I used on the bottom half, but the longer poles near the display were split by the screws in this case. If you come up with a better solution, I would like to know.

This is probably the best example of how different materials, despite appearing like you can machine them to look the same, will behave very differently. Wood is, in particular, very different from plastic and metal, because it is far more anisotropic due to its grain structure. Those long and narrow bosses are acceptable in a metal or plastic part, but won't hold up at all in wood. For a better solution, I recommend not trying to follow the exact shape as the plastic part for the internals, but have as much material as possible; if you need to, use longer screws.

Many electronics were housed in wooden cabinets for over a century (e.g. radios, televisions, turntables, etc.), so it would be wise to look at those for examples of how they used wood in their design.

A hidden property of wood, that I'm sure every woodworker knows and nods knowingly at this, is that it changes size as a function of humidity. You measure everything perfectly in a humid summer expecting it to behave like a chunk of metal, and then it all falls apart when dry winter rolls in.

That's when you start noticing particular details in professional furniture that are designed to accommodate this; things like certain elements intentionally not being glued or attached to allow for this movement.

I built myself a shed earlier in the year and the right now my unclosable windows are a damning reminder of this fact.

Get a wood planer, either manual or automatic (electrical). If you can temporarily remove the window you can shave off just a bit of wood to give it more space.

That’s my plan. We’re in the Uk and it’s basically rained most days this year. Will take a look once things dry out. In the meantime I’ve just been leaving the windows open for ventilation anyway.

    >  I recommend not trying to follow the exact shape
    > as the plastic part for the internals[...]

Good advice in general, but in this case I don't see how they'd have that option, as the long poles need to mount the display and a circuit board. See [1] and subsequently [2], and [3] which shows the rear of the GameBoy (where those screws go).

I think a better solution in this case is to either just forgo wood for those particular areas, e.g. you could use plastic or metal parts that the screws would go into, and glue or otherwise securely mount those to the wood.

Or similarly, use wood for the poles, but don't drill holes in them, and use some alternate mechanism to hold the body together. They're already using magnets for the battery cover, and could presumably use a large amount of magnets to hold the two pieces of the body itself together.

Finally, I don't think looking at antique wooden electronics is going to be useful. When electronic consumer products were made out of wood the electrical components were much bigger, so they didn't need to deal with these sorts of problems. Most of those only used wood as the "box", see e.g. [4].

1. https://there.oughta.be/assets/images/2023-11-03/asm4.jpg

2. https://there.oughta.be/assets/images/2023-11-03/asm5.jpg

3. https://there.oughta.be/assets/images/2023-11-03/batteries.j...

4. https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/001_jena5020radio/

The holes could be tapped before shaving down the wood, and then screws with less thick threads could be used. That would prevent splitting and still provide a secure connection.

There's better and worse ways to do this, but in the end wood is just inherently unsuitable for things of this size.

Any screw needs to "grab" onto the side of the hole it's drilled into, when that screw is going through a cylinder that looks to me 1-3mm in diameter it'll only take so much force before it'll snap.

And that's assuming that you get lucky with the material, you might run into a knot in the wood, in which case it would just fall apart without any force being applied to it.

I've made small woodworking projects by hand with clearances like this. You just need to understand the grain and type of wood and be careful. Once it's assembled it'll be strong enough for general use.

i dont work in wood very much, but cocobolo and ebony machine alot more like a soft metal. you can certainly catch the grain wrong and chip off a piece, but they take a thread pretty well.

This is a bit of a tangent, and not sure I’ll have any other opportunity to mention this here, but…

I used to play the heck out of Tetris on to OG Game Boy. I probably played it, by far, more than any other Game Boy game, and probably any game around that 5-10 year period.

But boy has it not aged well, at all. I played it recently on the Switch, and couldn’t handle it for more than a few minutes.

The lack of multiple next tetrominos, no hold, no instant drop, no ghost, the completely random draw of pieces [1], and it just felt sluggish.

I didn’t realize how much it had evolved, and how spoiled I was to the QoL updates over the years (and I think these were all fairly evolutionary additions, making it hard to realize the drastic difference).

I’m usually more nostalgic for classic games (I still enjoy playing some classic NES/SNES games), but when it comes to Tetris, give me the modern one any day (Tetris 99 and Tetris Effect are two of my recent favorites).

[1] https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers

Edit: corrected next and quick drop.

I can still play older Tetris games without the modern features and enjoy them for what they are. In fact, I kinda like that there wasn't an established "standard" of how Tetris games should play back then, and the different games feel quite different to play as a result. But the randomizer in the Game Boy game sucks a lot of enjoyment out of it for me. Combined with the shorter playfield (18 rows instead of the standard 20) and the blocks instantly locking upon touching the bottom, it often feels like a single mistake is impossible to recover from at higher levels.

Recently I found this romhack for it that essentially adds all those modern features to it, and it does play a lot better. https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5813/

Regarding the randomizer article: Tetris requires some randomness, but also some prevention of "floods" and "droughts". This sounds remarkably like the use of blue noise in dithering. Unlike purely random white noise, blue noise optimizes for "even" sequences without too many repetitions or large gaps in occurrences.

I assume a similar thing is possible in a randomizer, which would make more even sequences of draws more likely than ones which are less even.

Of course perfectly "even" distributions would no longer be random at all (each of the seven pieces would reoccur after exactly seven steps), but one could make anything else just less likely, depending on how far it deviates from the most likely seven step reoccurrence.

> The lack of a next tetromino, no hold, no fast drop, no ghost, the completely random draw of pieces [1], and it just felt sluggish.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood something but the original GameBoy Tetris definitely showed you the next piece and had fast drop.

You’re right, it does show the next piece. But some modern ones show you more than one (e.g. Tetris 99 shows the next four pieces queued up).

Re: fast drop, I mean press up to insta-drop. OG Tetris allowed pressing down for a fast-ish drop, but not instant (which is what I meant).

Showing more pieces in advance makes the game easier, but it's unclear whether it also makes it better.

Yeah, for sure. I think it can be helpful when planning tetrises, and figuring out whether to just plug the chasm with a non-line piece to buy you some time when you’re close to the top.

There's ROM hacks that add most of the modern features of tetris to the GB version.

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/5813/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDYciJzzTvw

For anyone looking for a high quality Tetris clone, check out Apotris https://akouzoukos.com/apotris It is for the Gameboy Advance and plays well on handheld emulators and flash carts.

If you want controls and scrolling for the youtube short link, just use the short id as the video id in the normal youtube url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePvpYVNEvzk

I once tried to make a wooden Gameboy advance, but it wooden work.

Ducks

It would look a lot better and probably be stronger if the grain was going vertically IMO

This is gorgeous. Would love Nintendo to release exactly this, even if a bit expensive. I would like my kids (6 and 7yo) to experience cartridges (aka "one game at a time") if possible.

This actually wouldn't be that hard to make with hand tools. You basically make it in sections and then combine. Layout can be made exact by using an imprint.

Why don't you show us how it's done?

I'd also like to see it done with hand tools so that I can give it a go.

The Gameboy is impressive but I can't stop chuckling at the site's URL pattern, that's what really ties it together for me.

I wonder which wood has the highest thermal conductivity. I’ve seen strength and modulus and a few other things but not conductivity.

Ironwood

Lovely! That is, except for the shoddy white in-filled graphic details. Should've lightly laser-etched those, imho.

CNC set up looks a little bit more complicated than a 3d setup, is it usually the case ?

If you meant 3d print, then yes for beginner setups. CNC requires a closed loop system and should include dust extraction if hardwoods are being used.

Wow, the result is stunning!

Stellar upvotes and kudos for the domain and URL naming scheme!

Really cool. I wonder about it's conductivity though.

Very nice work, and impeccable documentation, fantastic.

Looks like acacia? That would be worth mentioning.

The wood used is specifucally mentioned in the fourth sentence.

It is walnut

I watched the process on YT. Fantastic job.

What a cool thing!

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