Planet Arduino

A new guide today in the Adafruit Learning System: BLE Cat Thermal Printer with MEMENTO

Picture it: Toys “R” Us, 1998. Sonic has yet to run on a Nintendo system and there is only one PlayStation. Your eye catches the new Game Boy Printer behind a security cage and you think about how cool it would be to print out your Pokémon stats to show off to your friends at recess.

Almost 30 years later and everything old is new again. You can use the MEMENTO camera board with one of the internet famous BLE cat thermal printers to instantly print photos with the classic “gameboy” grayscale filter.

This guide will show you how to use the MEMENTO camera board with a BLE cat thermal printer to print photos with a “gameboy” grayscale filter.

Read more at BLE Cat Thermal Printer with MEMENTO

Tetris was as a perfect complement to Nintendo’s original Game Boy when it came out in 1989, and now “Copper Dragon” has been able to fit an entire system for it — sans monitor or speakers — inside of a faux NES controller. 

Impressively, this feat was accomplished with an Arduino Nano and a few passive components, producing not only very believable grayscale blocks, but also playing the familiar tune to accompany the video.

Two signal pins are used for the gray levels, plus a pin for sync, and video generation is programmed in AVR assembler code. Audio is not just PWM, but a simple DAC circuit created by charging and discharging a capacitor at the video line frequency.

I wanted to build a game console into the case of a small USB game pad (a NES controler look-alike). To make the work a challenge, I wanted to only use an Arduino Nano clocked at 16 MHz and some passive components (diodes are OK) and create the best possible video and audio signal that is imaginable with such restrictions.

As it turned out, a monochrome 288p video signal with 4 gray scales is possible when progamming the controller at machine level. 4-channel music is also possible.

My game of choice is Tetris in a version that comes pretty close to the original GameBoy version with a very similar audio track.

[Christopher Mitchell] has given Texas Instruments calculators the ability to capture images through a Game Boy Camera with ArTICam. First introduced in 1998, The Game Boy Camera was one of the first low-cost digital cameras available to consumers. Since then it has found its way into quite a few projects, including this early Atmel AT90 based hack, and this Morse code transceiver.

TI calculators don’t include a Game Boy cartridge slot, so [Christopher] used an Arduino Uno to interface the two. He built upon the Arduino-TI Calculator Linking (ArTICL) Library  to create ArTICam. Getting the Arduino to talk with the Game Boy Camera’s M64282FP image sensor turned out to be easy, as there already are code examples available. The interface between the camera sensor and the Arduino is simple enough. 6 digital lines for an oddball serial interface, one analog sense line, power and ground. [Christopher] used a shield to solder everything up, but says you can easily get away with wiring directly the Arduino Uno’s I/O pins. The system is compatible with the TI-83 Plus and TI-84 Plus family of calculators. Grabbing an image is as simple as calling  GetCalc(Pic1) from your calculator program.

So, If you have an old calculator lying around, give it a try to enjoy some 128×123-pixel grayscale goodness!

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, classic hacks

When the Nintendo Gameboy was first released in 1989, it was a tremendous commercial success. Gameboy developed a following among gamers that is in many ways still alive to this day. Here are 10 awesome projects inspired by the venerable Gameboy. Some merge the latest maker electronics with late-80s Gameboy […]

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