Brads Electronic Projects Forum

First of let me start by saying thank you to Brad for the very warm welcome. The e-mails we exchange before i posted this topic gave me the impression that this is a very friendly place.

About me.....

Hi i'm John from Manchester England. i'm involved in a hobby with my uncle where we build arcade machines in our spare time. We've built two arcades in the past and are currently building two more machines......a Bartop and the reason i'm here, the Super size Gameboy.

So i don't bore you with the details i'll just post a link to our site and get back to the Gameboy.

http://www.premierarcades.com/ (should be launched within a week)

http://gallery.premierarcades.com/#!home Project galleys







I must start by saying i have Zero, non, nil experience with FPGAs, i have never dabbled in this area before so please be bare with me if i'm talkin' "noob".

The idea originally with the Gameboy was to simply have a pc running a emulator that would in turn be connected to pc monitor. We then decided to "upscale" the games cartridges also and have the original Gameboy hardware running inside the cab.

This is where i run into my problem. i need to be able to output a vga signal from the Gameboy and have it display on a vga monitor. (and if possible add a green tint to the display).

i can do this easy via a PC emulator with the below results, but this doesn't allow us to us the stock hardware with functional removable game carts.



From what i understand, i need to buy a fpga, and program it to do the fancy work......there is nothing i can buy "off the shelf" so i'm lead to believe.

So this is my plea for help.... can you give me any pointers to get this project off the ground..... or even help me out? i don't even know what i need to purchase to get this done.

i have found the following resource but i'll still totally confused.

After searching a bit, I found the following solutions:
Game Boy VGA using an FPGA http://hackaday.com/2010/12/12/game-boy ... g-an-fpga/
Gameboy VGA adapter http://ackspace.nl/wiki/Gameboy_VGA_adapter
Game Boy Advance TV adapters http://www.konlabs.com/articles_data/gba_transverter/


thanks in advance.

There are a couple of FPGA projects like FPGA Arcade which are being worked on (off site). There is also a Papilio Shield for the Arduino (off site).

I would start out with the site FPGA for Fun to learn about FPGAs and then there is a site on stepped tutorials:

Using FPGA to create Video Signals
(Creating a Video Signal from FPGA Pins)
http://www.fpga4fun.com/PongGame.html
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=384

Free online course of FPGAs. VDHL and Xilinx based
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=729

Stepped tutorials on how to do simple FPGA design
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=466

Free Range VHDL (eBooks)
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=860

VHDL Getting Started Volume 2
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=822

There is also a summary of FPGA boards on the Gameduino site:

http://excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-devboar ... #devboards

Hi again John and welcome to the forum

I did some more searching and unfortunately I have not found anything out there that is ready done - I have found some just like mine in that they have started working on a gameboy to vga converter and never finished it!

There are a mixture of projects out there that could be mixed together to get gameboy to vga to work, such as the gameboy to oscilloscope project and then mixing that with an arduino to VGA project.

Again, this is something I would love to help out with, I just don't have the time to spare at the moment but perhaps early in to the new year I could but I imagine that you would want it in the next month or two.

If worse comes to worse, you could just put in a temporary computer with emulator for the time being and then sometime next year I could get my converter finished and then you could use that.