The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy

The original Gameboy was released in 1989 to mixed reviews. While its success is now ingrained in our cultural memory, when it was launched it was a technologically inferior product. The Gameboy was designed to be an affordable, low-power, portable gaming system. He was limited in many ways. No backlight on the screen and incredibly low installed memory available for encoding games. Review magazines of the time viewed these features as negative, but these design compromises were exactly the reason the Gameboy was successful. This was a console for the masses. Even with these limitations, engineers and programmers came up with ingenious methods to create games that have not only stood the test of time but have launched some of the most valuable franchises in the history of the entertainment industry.

TV shows, movies, toys and even theme parks. This is the crazy

engineering

of the Nintendo Gameboy. The Game Boy's simple design borrows much of its success from its older brother, the NES. A simple and familiar controller setup. Nintendo knew that size and weight were the most important factors in making a system portable. The Gameboy was almost half the size and half the weight of its competitors. At just under 15cm high and 3cm thick, it weighed just 220g. This 35-year-old console doesn't look too big like mobile phones of this era. Gameboy focused on the user experience from the beginning, an ethos that has defined Nintendo to this day.

But how did Nintendo manage to make the Gameboy so much smaller and lighter? To begin with, one of the main technological limitations of the early 90s was these things. Alkaline batteries. While our Gen Z audience may recognize them as the batteries they need to replace in their TV remote from time to time. These things were everywhere in the '90s. They cost about 50 cents each, or about 1.16 in today's money. I spent every penny of my pocket money buying these batteries to power my Gameboy in the 90s. Big, bulky, non-rechargeable and expensive. Minimizing its use as much as possible would give Nintendo an advantage over its competitors.

The Game Boy's main competitor, the Sega Game Gear, used 6 AA batteries. While the Gameboy used only 4. This of course saved space, made the Gameboy more compact and saved the consumer money. Especially since the Gameboy batteries lasted much longer despite having less power available. The Game Gear's 6 AA batteries supplied 4.5 watts to power its electronics. Draining all 6 batteries in just 3 hours. It costs about 2 dollars and 30 cents an hour to play. The GameBoy, with its 4 batteries, allowed up to 30 hours of play. It costs only 16 cents per hour of play. Imagine being me in the '90s. Trying to explain to my dad, who remembers when someone first bought a car in his town, that he needed money for a new set of batteries every two weeks.

Well, for the Sega Game Gear that was probably getting closer every day. One of the keys to Nintendo's success was recognizing this limitation and solving it. While the Game Gear featured a fully illuminated color LCD screen. The Gameboy featured a monochrome screen that was capable of displaying only 4 shades of green that were impossible to see in the dark because it had no backlight. While the Game Gear may have gotten better reviews with its power-hungry electronics, the Gameboy won customers with a system that consumed just 0.7 watts. Game Boy engineers were determined to use low-power displays, and even though this display is a big part of our nostalgia today, it almost led to the cancellation of the entire project.

The best low-power LCD displays available in the 1980s were powered by a passive array of electrodes that controlled a grid of pixels. A pixel was formed by liquid crystals sandwiched between two perpendicular polarizing filters. At rest, these liquid crystals bend the light that bounces off the backplate, allowing light to pass through the filter assembly. These crystals respond to changes in voltage, uncoiling as voltage is applied, when this happens, less light can pass through. Early prototypes of the original Gameboy used liquid crystals that naturally rotated only 90 degrees at rest. These 90 degree structures slowly unscrew with voltage and the amount of light transmitted is proportional to the applied voltage.

However, there was a problem. This slope is not steep enough. This was a problem for the low-power passive grid array displays used in early versions of the GameBoy. The low-power display used small voltage changes to differentiate between on and off, and the voltage difference needed to turn the pixels on and off was too large. A slight difference in voltage resulted in a very subtle difference in the amount of light emitted by the individual pixels "on" and "off." In other words, the contrast was very low. This was made worse when the passive matrix created a set of interconnected pixels where voltage could leak to neighboring pixels.

Therefore, neighboring pixels would also be activated slightly, resulting in a blurry image that would look even worse from the sides. When Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi tested a version of the Gameboy with these 90-degree rotating screens, he canceled the entire project. However, a breakthrough occurred in the late 1980s. SHARP perfected a new type of LCD display known as Supertwisted Nematics. These screens used glass with rotations of between 180 and 270 degrees. These additional turns made a sharper transition between on and off possible. This is what a super twisted crystalline transition curve looks like. The transmitted light decreases rapidly with a much smaller voltage change.

This technology resulted in sharper black and white pixels, with the

gameboy

's green color being a byproduct of the tint from polarizing filters, but how did the

gameboy

create 4 shades of green? It was not possible to create these shades with 4 different voltage settings. Instead, the gameboy created different tones by quickly turning pixels on and off. Faster pulses result in darker tones, while slower pulses result in lighter tones. This is the same technique that LEDs use to brighten and dim. We cannot perceive the pulses with our eyes, but cameras can capture them. The quest to make the system as cheap as possible, of course, created limitations elsewhere.

The 8-bit CPU could only handle 64 kilobytes of memory, less than a frame from this video. Programming a game like Super Mario Land with so little available memory required some creative problem solving. All of the Gameboy's functions, math, and logic were produced simply by reading or modifying those 64 kilobtyes. Some are read from the Gameboy itself while others are read from the inserted game cartridge. These 48 numbers, for example, are read from the cartridge each time the Gameboy is turned on, and each licensed game cartridge must have exactly the same data encoded in this location. This is the data you read, just numbers.

But, by rearranging them and converting them to binary, we can begin to see a familiar pattern. By turning off the pixels we can distinguish that nostalgic logo that appeared on the screen before any game. Inside the Gameboy is a copy of these same numbers. During the boot process, the Game Boy displayed the logo stored on the cartridge while comparing it to the one on the system, byte by byte. If a faulty connection caused a byte to be read incorrectly, the Game Boy would not start. This inadvertently sparked a magical tradition among children around the world. A technique that was transferred across cultures and continents before the Internet existed to share that knowledge.

Remove the cartridge and blow to remove any dust that may be causing poor connections. For this byte-by-byte comparison, they could have used any number or image. But they intentionally used the Nintendo logo to stop pirated games. If you were an unlicensed game developer, this would require you to display Nintendo's trademark logo, and if Nintendo didn't allow you to use it, you would be violating trademark laws even if the games themselves didn't. However, using individual bytes to create the image, the way the Nintendo logo was displayed, is not a very efficient way to fill the entire screen for games.

If the 160 by 144 pixel wide screen had to address each individual pixel, it would need a list of more than 23,000 numbers. Dedicating 35% of the available directory just to configure the display does not make sense. The actual amount of space dedicated to creating images is only 12.5% ​​of the available directory. But how is it possible for such a small memory to create graphics? The key here is the use of mosaics. These are the tiles from the game Super Mario Land 2, a classic Super Mario scrolling game. Each tile consisted of an 8x8 square. Instead of building the frame pixel by pixel, the Gameboy system rendered the screen in a three-step process.

The CPU would first assemble a background made of 32x32 tiles. But the Gameboy screen size only fits 20 tiles on one side and 18 on the other. Therefore, a display box must be placed on top of this background. This view box could be moved along the background allowing for smooth scrolling. It also has a local coordinate system that allows non-moving information, such as lives or scores, to be displayed consistently in the same location. Movable objects like Mario or goombas that can interact with the background have a special name, they are called sprites. Sprites are just 8x8 pixel wide tiles that can be flipped or rotated.

For larger characters, like Mario, a set of 4 sprites was needed to create the full character. Once the frame was ready to be displayed, the Gameboy set the pixel values ​​on the screen line by line. This is called line scanning. This practice was a legacy of the NES, which was designed for use with the ray tracing of cathode ray tube displays. CRTS work by altering the path of an electron beam to hit a screen coated with fluorescent chemicals. This technique allowed programmers to create animations. At the end of each line scan, Nintendo gave programmers the option to pause the line scan mid-frame to adjust the position of the viewing window.

This is the introduction to the Links Awakening game. This was all created using a static background. Once the background was assembled, the tiles and screen placement were set, and the line scanning began. Here there would be a pause and the display window would move a little bit. The line scan would then restart the drawing and the final product would emulate the movement. Enemies in Link's Awakening like this one or the introduction of some games like TITUS were created using these techniques. Even racing games used mid-frame pauses to create curves in the road. This design ideology of simplification also affected the console's audio.

The Gameboy came with a single speaker controlled by only 4 channels. Two square wave tone generators, a white noise generator, and a separate channel that could load any custom waveform stored on the game cartridge. That's all. Let's create a song by sending the desired frequencies and times to the first two square wave channels. Now let's add our custom chipped triangle wave to the fourth channel with its frequency and timing parameters. Now, the final touch, a bit of percussion to highlight the beats, done with the white noise channel. This style of music is a big part of our nostalgia and love for Gameboy.

I can hear the introduction to the Pokémon games in my head to this day. But games are more than just sights and sounds: they are complete stories that need data and space for logic. Of the 65,000 numbers that the Gameboy reads, only half are read from the cartridge. This worked well for simple games like Tetris, where the complete instructions and data needed to run the game were less than 32,000 numbers. Limited data was common in the 80s, so game developers developed a technique called memory banking, where the game divides the data into smaller sections or banks. Basically, the game dynamically switches between different memory banks to access a larger data set than the hardware originally allowed.

The Game Boy hardware can only read 32 KB of data, but Pokémon Red/Blue has a memory size of 373 kB. The data had to be divided into 44 banks. As the player explores different areas, the game seamlessly switches between these memory banks to upload and download relevant data. This is controlled with a small chipinside the cartridge. When the Pokedex was opened, the chip accessed "Bank 2B", where the 151 Pokémon had a 100-character description that was printed on the screen using tiles. If the player entered a Pokemart, the chip would access Bank 1 to obtain the prices of each item.

As the player moves between cities, locations, or activities, the game continues to manage these memory banks dynamically. Nintendo engineers made a decision that allowed them to put consoles in the hands of gamers around the world. For many, like me, it was their first experience with video games. With an introductory price of just $89, it was significantly cheaper than either of its two main competitors and much cheaper to run. This gamer-first spirit is what defined Nintendo as a company. While its competitors focused on ever-increasing hardware specifications, Nintendo focused on accessibility. The Nintendo Wii, with its motion controllers, introduced hundreds of thousands of older people who were unfamiliar with traditional game controls to gaming.

The Nintendo Switch works as both a portable gaming console and a docked home console, with detachable controllers that have allowed me and my friends to have impromptu Mario Kart sessions in airports and hotel rooms. Nintendo is a master of interactive design and the Nintendo Gameboy was a generation-defining piece of design. Devices like the GameBoy were designed for a simpler time, when the only way to add software was a physical cartridge and the only way to input or send information from the outside world was a link cable. Decades later, any device, even if it is only intended for gaming, will require some type of account login connected to personal data and will constantly transmit your data to a variety of servers.

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