FPGA-based Gameboy clone

[rand0mcit]

Hi all,

I'd like to tell you about the FPGA-based Gameboy clone that I'm currently building. I started this project because I wanted to learn how to build a handheld console and also because I'd like to play my Gameboy games on a nice big screen.

Main goals for this project:

• Run Gameboy games from cartridge
• Pixel-perfect representation on a larger screen
• Should still feel like playing with a Gameboy
• Accurate speed without lags or glitches
• Personal: Learn a whole lot of stuff while building it

So, I first went and designed an equivalent to the original Gameboy's CPU board featuring a Xilinx Spartan 7 FPGA, an USB-C connector, and of course a cartridge interface:

I then added a second board that will be responsible for video and audio output as well as button inputs:

Both boards in action running Tetris from cartridge:

The Gameboy implementation that I used is not mine - it's called VerilogBoy and works very well so far.

I even added limited debug capabilities using UART over USB:

The whole project is open source and it's on my GitHub. It's not well documented yet which makes it hard to reproduce. I do want to change this, though!

Future
My plans for the future include:

• Create a proper custom shell (I already started with this)
• Add Gameboy Color support
• Extend debug support and add serial console
• Create documentation and maybe a tutorial

That's it for now. Let me know what you think. If you've got any questions I'll gladly answer them

 

[thedrew]

This really brings me back. I love where we are getting with technology advancements here on the forums. Awesome project!