My First Gameboy Pi Zero :)

[Pumpytums]

Hi everyone,
after several months my first Pi Zero Gameboy.

Parts used

BW V7 screen
Kepad PCB off ebay (connected using GPIO pins works great)
Standard DMG-01 (not an original one)
Power/charger board of Banggood (has additional cell protection too)
18650 3400mAh Cell (protected)
cheap USB sound card connected to OTG connector I couldn't get it to work off the pads very odd.
Has a working volume wheel and earphone socket (stereo) and a 3w pam8403 (mono) (small amount of interference adds to the charm)

Worked out quite well I just need to tinker with the sound to get it to work on mame. My favourite game Manic Miner plays so well

Sadly it has no wifi but its quite easy to transfer files using windows and a card reader.

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[Chedda]

Looks pretty good! Nice job

What's your battery life with a single 18650?

[Pumpytums]

Hi many thanks,

I measured the current draw this morning its about 1A to 1.2 A from the battery so I reckon the battery life should be 2-2.5 hours.

I'm going to add an additional switch in the back to turn the amp off as I think this may be using over 0.5A on its own that will hopefully push the battery life to 5 hours.

Sound is now working on Mame too

I have just tweaked it again to add a cartridge and sorted the charger cover.

Many thanks again

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[Pumpytums]

Just checked battery life with it sitting on my desk with amp connected :-

2 hours Super Ghouls and Ghosts (attract mode) SNES

1 Hour Metal Slug 2 (attract mode) MAME

3 hours and it wasn't flat that's pretty good

I have some nice stickers to replace the Adams family one

This one will be for sale eventually when its 100% finished I will be making some more but they have 3.2" SPI screens.

I like the look of BW screens but I'm not happy with the heat the PCB generates.

[Pumpytums]

I thought I would post a solution to the none working USB off the pads. This was due to me enabling the Ethernet over USB using the following from http://blog.gbaman.info/?p=791

Setting up Pi Zero OTG - The quick way (No USB keyboard, mouse, HDMI monitor needed)

More details - http://blog.gbaman.info/?p=791

For this method, alongside your Pi Zero, MicroUSB cable and MicroSD card, only an additional computer is required, which can be running Windows (with Bonjour, iTunes or Quicktime installed), Mac OS or Linux (with Avahi Daemon installed, for example Ubuntu has it built in).
1. Flash Raspbian Jessie full or Raspbian Jessie Lite onto the SD card.
2. Once Raspbian is flashed, open up the boot partition (in Windows Explorer, Finder etc) and add to the bottom of the config.txt file dtoverlay=dwc2 on a new line, then save the file.
3. Finally, open up the cmdline.txt. Be careful with this file, it is very picky with its formatting! Each parameter is seperated by a single space (it does not use newlines). Insert modules-load=dwc2,g_ether after rootwait. To compare, an edited version of the cmdline.txt file at the time of writing, can be found here.
4. That's it, eject the SD card from your computer, put it in your Raspberry Pi Zero and connect it via USB to your computer. It will take up to 90s to boot up (shorter on subsequent boots). It should then appear as a USB Ethernet device. You can SSH into it using raspberrypi.local as the address.

Be warned this appears to disable the direct connection of a USB Device or USB port to PP22 & PP23. However if you use a OTG cable direct to the port it will still work. I reversed the above change to config.txt and cmdline.txt and it worked perfectly.

Hope that helps someone, It came to me yesterday when I was building my 2nd Gameboy and I had exactly the same problem as my 1st build. It had to be software hence the above solution.

[Pumpytums]

Just thought I would post a few videos of it running.

https://youtu.be/8aG4w-6IlLo

https://youtu.be/_X0cTD-4azU


My 2nd Gameboy is also nearing completion I will post some images in a new thread shortly this uses a 3.2" SPI screen and is much neater inside. I did a quick build of the power system and sound last night so hopefully in a few days