There oughta be…

…a blog with awesome projects. A collection of overcomplicated devices nobody needs. A sanctum for all the things that did not get living room clearance, but oughta be seen by fellow nerds.

There oughta be a Game Boy capture cartridge.

20 December 2022

I present to you: The GB Interceptor. It is an adapter that goes between an unmodified Game Boy and the cartridge and offers a video stream of the game via USB.

Thumbnail of the youtube video: A render image of a Game Boy showing a game of Tetris in progress. From its top protrudes the PCB of the GB Interceptor with a Tetris cartridge on top. To the right is a label saying USB and an arrow pointing towards a screenshot of OBS showing the same image as the Game Boy.
Click the image to see the video on youtube.com.

The video above should give you a good overview of what it does, how it works and what its limitations are. This article here goes more into the technical details of how it works. If you are interested in how to order and build your own GB Interceptor, check out github and the order and build video.

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There oughta be a Live Q&A about the WiFi Game Boy Cartridge.

28 January 2022

There will be a Live Q&A session about the Game Boy WiFi cartridge on Friday 9pm (CET). Ask anything!

Thumbnail of the youtube video: A photo of a Game Boy Color, an original Game Boy and an Analogue Pocket with a picture of me showing on the Game Boy Color.
Click the image to see the video on youtube.com.

I have never done this before and am quite curious on how it will turn out and how many will attend. See you on Friday!

There oughta be GTA5 for the Game Boy.

13 January 2022

When I presented my WiFi Game Boy cartridge a few weeks ago, I only had very few simple text-based demos. This post and especially the accompanying video now deliver more. In fact, I might have gone a bit too far, as I managed to stream full resolution video and even play games via WiFi. But see for yourself:

Thumbnail of the youtube video: A photo of an Game Boy showing the GTA 5 title screen with a render of the WiFi cartridge behind it.
Click the image to see the video on youtube.com.

So, as usual, you have two alternatives to start here: Watch the video or read the article. If you are just curious and want to see what I did, definitely check out the video. If you want to understand exactly how it works and if you want to reproduce it or find tricks for your own projects, go for the article and the linked code. In any case, if you have not seen the previous article and/or video on the cartridge itself, you should start there.

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There oughta be a WiFi Game Boy cartridge.

16 December 2021

It took a while, but I finally managed to create my own Game Boy cartridge. With WiFi! At this point, it can only demo a simple telnet-style communication and access Wikipedia articles, but I am confident that I will showcase more in the future. For now, the interesting and surprisingly tricky part is how the thing works at all.

Thumbnail of the youtube video a render image of the cartridge PCB in front of a Game Boy with the text Wifi cartridge next to it.
Click the image to see the video on youtube.com.

If you just want to see the cartridge in action or want to get into all the details, I highly recommend to watch the video first as it goes through the difficulties and their respective solutions. In contrast, this article here is less visual in its explanations and mostly documents the device in detail, so unless you are already familiar with the parallel memory interface of the Game Boy, you might want to start with the overview from the video.

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There oughta be a Blender plugin to animate growth.

24 May 2021

I have created a Blender plugin that takes an image texture with some structure and generates an animation of how this structure grows. To be more precise, it creates a non-color data image with the animation information that can be used in a shader. Since animations are hard to describe in words or individual images, I highly recommend the video describing this plugin.

Thumbnail of the youtube video showing a blue glowing mace with the video title on top.
Click the image to see the video on youtube.com.

If you are only looking for specific information or the download of the plugin, have a look at this article. It serves as the documentation, but it will have only little explanation of how the plugin works and how the results can be used. Refer to the video for these details and to see how the plugin is used in Blender as shown in the actual Blender user interface.

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