Upgrade An Old Gameboy With Raspberry Pi #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

from Upgrade An Old Gameboy With Raspberry Pi #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

by Rebecca Houlihan

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Gut your old Gamboy and upgrade it with a Raspberry Pi. via instructables



Picture of Gameboy LCD+Raspi Upgrade

Hi all! After being a long-time browser of this site I decided it was time to publish my first Instructable. I’m very much into all things retro-gaming. I’ve built a full-size virtual pinball running Hyperspin which may well be my next Instructable. I’m also in the process of upgrading an early 90’s Final Lap driving cabinet to be a multi-game machine.


Here I will show how I gutted an old non-working Nintendo Gameboy original, and fitted these parts instead:


– 3.5″ 320×240 LCD with driver PCB


– Raspberry Pi (Model A)


– custom built button PCB


– 1x 18650 Li-Ion cell


– USB Li-Ion charger board


– 3.7V to 5V DC-DC converter board


– stereo audio amp board


– stereo speakers


I’ve seen other Instructables doing a similar thing, but I set myself a few challenges and desired features of my build which include:


– Fitting the Pi with little or (ideally) no modification


– Have the Pi’s USB port and HDMI port remain accessible


– Have the SD card hidden away but also easily accessible


– Retain analogue control of volume


– Retain normal functions of all front buttons, also make it easy to add buttons if the need arises


– Upgrade sound with internal stereo speakers


– Have major components unpluggable (ie. not have all things hard-wired to each other)


– Retain some kind of visible power LED and charge status LEDs


– Have the Gameboy case fit back together cleanly but very securely


– Achieve a good run-time per charge, around 2hrs+


In the end I think I achieved all these goals. Initially I wanted to fit 2x Li-Ion cells but there just wasn’t enough room for that 2nd cell.


I had enough experience with Raspian/Raspbmc to know how to get the Pi up and running with RetroPie. I was new to EmulationStation though. I also had not previously dealt with the GPIO pins on a Pi. But I soon discovered how useful these pins are and that it would be possible to control not only the games but also navigate EmulationStation menus as well. Each button grounds a certain GPIO pin, then software makes that action produce a keystroke, as defined in a config file.


Anyway, on with the mod!



Full tutorial


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