I bought a Game Boy Color :)
On 4th March, 2013 I bought a Game Boy Color in really good condition, so this became my very first game console (at age 27, huh).
On this day I heard the welcome notes for the first time – it felt great, hehe.
It says “© 1998 Nintendo” on the back, so this is a 15 years old platform (actually mostly a 24 years old (Game Boy, 1989) with some improvements), but still great! I’m in love with it.
I’ve also checked out the Game Boy Advance (GBA) before I bought decided to go with GB/GBC line – the GBA has a 32-bit CPU at 16 MHz and 288 kB RAM + 96 kB of VRAM, that’s way too much, too advanced, I don’t need all these, I don’t want all these.
So I am now very happy with this little Game Boy Color – next thing on my TODO list to buy a programmable cartridge and start to test my developments outside the emulator.
Development for Game Boy (Color)
I have to say, the Game Boy is a pretty impressive platform.
With a 4 MHz 8-bit CPU, 8 kB RAM and 8 kB video RAM (serving the 2.6″ display with 160×144 resolution) it has great limitations but nice perspectives at the same time.
It is good to be known that the display is refreshed at 60 FPS (whoa) and the device has a 4 channel sound system (with mono speaker but stereo headphone jack). It has also hardware-level tile storing (8×8 or 8×16 tile data, the pixels itselves) and tile mapping (32×32 tiles map, that’s 256×256 pixels on this bad boy:)) function, also the background-scrolling is implemented here (at any given time 20×18 tiles (160×144 pixels) are visible but 32×32 (256×256 pixels) are in the video RAM).
Documentations I find useful and any work I do will be stored in a git repository on github: https://github.com/gheja/gameboydev/