Video: It's Fun To Learn About The Game Boy's CPU

I remember when I got the Game Boy when I was twelve in 1992. Up until that point, except a brief time with Atari, my gaming was solely on PC. And yes, it looked like 13 generations behind when I first launched the GB.. But at the same time there was magic there.... I remember writing all these passwords down, in BurgerTime or first playing Super Mario Land. I was lucky because I had this huge multicart The first time you play 1vs1 in Tetris with that cable link or some of the other games that let you do it... it was brilliant.

Nintendo is the master of getting great gaming experiences out of underpowered hardware.

Wow, that was an incredibly interesting video! As someone who's studying computing, it was great to understand how the innards of the Game Boy works - especially by comparing it with Python!

Ah, the glorious Z80.

I miss these days when hardware was easily hackable and everything was just there and easy to spot.

That was a pretty awesome video. Congratulations to the creators for not just making it entertaining but also for managing to explain something that can do easily go over most people's heads whom don't have any knowledge in computer programming.

Nintendo made some killer profits. Battery life was a big plus point, the games were addictive and fun. Game Gear could eat through 6 AA batteries in two hours. Great system aswell but not really portable!

Ah the greatness of the Game Boy line. Too bad nowadays Nintendo has almost seemingly abandoned Yokoi's design philosophy. They still use ultra old, weak, and cheap internals, but they sacrificed battery life and cheap, affordable price for shoddy gimmicks enjoyed by a very small percentage of owners and relatively rushed design.
Since Sony is bowing out of the race after Vita, hopefully Nintendo can make a new Game Boy in addition to a new DS. The new DS can be as gimmicky and expensive as they want, but the Game Boy should be cheaper and offer a more traditional gaming experience on portable, with all the modern, USEFUL additions that handheld gaming has enjoyed since the GBA's death like 4 face buttons, 4 shoulder buttons, dual analog input of some kind, capacitive touchscreen, and motion sensors. Maybe a camera.
Or heck, offer both handhelds for the same price. The NXDS would likely be as powerful as the GPD XD or NVIDIA Shield Portable (...actually likely weaker than both of these.....), continuing on their usual of using very old technology. Then they can put on 3D , continue using the second screen (the best gaming innovation Nintendo has had this past decade.PERIOD.), use every input they introduced with 3DS and New 3DS and finally shoe-horn in some kind of new over-hy- I mean "EXCITING" gimmick that'll drive up the cost much higher than it should've been. Then the NXGB could go for the same price, but instead of some kind of expensive gimmick they could put in more modern and powerful hardware instead along with the more standard additions to handheld gaming that both the 3DS and Vita introduced like dual-analog sticks (Vita, then 3DS), motion controls (3DS then Vita), cameras (DSi and PSP), capacitive touchscreen (Vita), and finally 4 shoulder buttons (New 3DS). Putting L3 and R3 would be nice, too. Of course power was never a priority for the Game Boy line, but I like to think the GBA at least was pretty beefy for a handheld at its time. More powerful handheld devices popped up a couple years after it, but there weren't a massive step up when you looked at the games.
Ninty wouldn't even have to use the newest and most powerful hardware for the NXGB either. If they can make something that's at least on par with last year's $200 Shield TV and release it in late 2016 or in 2017, they'll be fine since that level of hardware would still be pretty powerful for handheld game developers and should be cheaper to produce (I imagine).

I've been preaching this lately. It's amazing to think about what these developers did with such limited hardware. They built some of the best games in the 90s on a glorified calculator CPU. I've always advocated that some of the best development practice is to create limitations for yourself. It breeds creative thinking.

Not only was it cheap to make, but it was also BRUTALLY durable!! History says there's one that survived a NUCLEAR BLAST!!! That ALONE makes it worth the money!!

@MrPuzzlez
Pretty sure it was just a normal bomb blast.
The electromagnetic pulse generated by a nuclear explosion would no doubt completely fry the electronics inside the Game Boy even if it somehow defied logic and survived the extreme heat and force of the bomb.

@AVahne Oh. But yet and still, it was a LOT more durable than a lot of today's electronics....

@Mario-Man-Child
Hmm... I am pretty sure the Xbox was more powerful than the GameCube.

I have the PS2, GameCube and the Xbox. And while the GameCube was more powerful than the PS2, and had some really impressive first party titles, I think all the multiplatform games where all way superior on the Xbox.

Underpowered doesn't mean boring. Something they've continued to today, and is still true today. Even if consumers and gamers refuse to acknowledge it sometimes.

Xbox has been the most powerful unit since it's launch, that said, it means the most power given to the unit. That doesn't mean it utilizes it in every game, or that every game is more fun and superior than other systems, it just goes to say Microsoft put in the most powerful and advanced things at the minute in comparison to the other competitors.
The N64, GameCube, Wii and WiiU are all the weaklings in terms of oomph (out of desireable systems, we could talk Ouya or 3DO), but there was and is absolutely no lack of excitement, fun and sales to keep any of these systems away, despite some belief. The GCN lasted despite doomed rumors and the WiiU is going still despite doomed rumors. The DS was insignificant in power compared to the PSP and look who triumphed in that battle, and the 3DS is superior to the Vita basically in every way except hardware. There's a full library, good graphics, and the highest sales of any gaming system this gen. Power is meaningless if there's a library of games, which is clearly why the GB and other underpowered systems will still succeed.

facepalm

Awesome video, i'm still a bit confused by the content (it's a lot to FULLY understand) but i feel like i learnt a lot about computers, especially some stuff i always wanted to understand.

So that's why T1-84 calculators can be hacked to play gameboy! They both use a zilog!

This was a very interesting video. I'm hardly versed in programming languages but can appreciate the effort it takes to learn one and use it. I also knew about Assembly being much harder to work with but only now truly understand what that meant.

LOLOLOL, I was actually making a gb emu right before I decided to go on NL and see if anything interesting had happened. Granted I know most, if not all of everything said in the video. Still neat though.

No way in hell the Game Boy has 30 hours of battery life.

@Yorumi What school do you go to? Nowadays there's, for better or worse, not that much need for asm, especially writing entire programs in them seeing as most C (and I'm assuming C++) compilers allow inline assembly. Haven't even heard of a university teaching asm for a long time unless it's for something specialized.

@Yorumi the N64 may have been more powerful, but damn those muddy graphics look nowhere near as nice as what the PS1 was capable of.

@Yorumi While a lot of it's best looking games do use prerendered backgrounds (which the N64 cartridges didn't have space for), even in games or scenes within games that are full 3D, the PS1 games look superior.
The filtering that the N64 had only made things look worse, while the grainy look of the PS1 actually allowed more detail to be seen, and made sure that pixel artists were still very valuable (most of the time textures were painted pixel by pixel) and could focus on the art, while texturing on the N64 was mostly about working around memory problems.

@LemonSlice But PS1 had that janky integer math for all the 3D space that made everything wiggle and jiggle for no reason.

Not picking on you in particular but I find all the old arguments propping themselves up against each other here to be so pointless in the face of what we have as experiences playing and enjoying the games. Do you really care about which one was slightly better than the other at this point? It mattered much more then now it's all just old tech and memories. If you go back to play those games you go back for the play. At least that's the way I look at it.

Not that I didn't care back then, it's just funny to me now. The general public's perception of power has always been so simplistic but there is some understanding of ports vs. native programming and how hardware alone isn't the whole story. (64-bit Jaguar! PS3 cores!)

@Yorumi @Monado_III
Assembly and all that good low-level stuff is currently making a wave through the education system again for just the reasons @Yorumi mentioned. We keep finding new reasons to push efficiency and wouldn't you know it, we still need people to make advances in compiling technologies for those high level languages to get to machine code. It's amazing how much progress is still being made in that space.

@Yorumi
How fun is it writing a game server? I get rare opportunities to work on my own game projects and I teach programming for a living but I haven't done much in the way of server code and networking.

Agreed about assembly. Even when it's not required I like to push students to understand what's happening closer to the metal.

@aaronsullivan @Yorumi I know it's still needed in some cases (compilers, drivers), just I never have heard of it actually being taught in regular CS courses since the rise and dominance of Java, C, C++ and web technologies. I eventually want to learn on x86_64 ASM programming, but I'm already pretty familiar with the concepts. I'm only 14 so I still have lots of time to learn.

@Mario-Man-Child To be honest, the SNES/Genesis debate is actually a quite interesting case. Why? Mega Drive/Genesis could do things faster, however SNES could do more colorful/complex things. This is the main difference.

Genesis had a faster CPU, faster RAM bandwidth and fillrate (I guess that was this whole "blast processing" thing?), but at a cost - it only featured 64 KB of VRAM, while SNES had a double value of 128KB - it was a tad slower, but enabled to display much more colors (and a handful of other effects) on the screen.

However, one of the main Genesis advantages, at least from the developer's point of view, was the choice of the legendary MC68000 as the main CPU - not only it features a delightful and relatively easy Assembler, it was also present in several popular 16-bit computers at the time, mainly the Atari ST and Amiga 500. And the extra CPU speed could be used for some nifty effects, like 3D polygons, without the need of using any extra chips (just like they handled the special effects in Amiga games, even on the OCS chipset).

However - yes, when it comes down to pure horsepower and juice, the SNES, thanks to the extra FX chips, could produce more complex things.
Don't get me wrong, though - I like both consoles equally.

Love the gaming historical articles. Always a good read. Keep up the fine work Damo.

Wow, what an interesting video! Can't wait for the next one.

@AlexOlney Yeah that came as a shock to me too! I didn't know RC Tycoon was written in Assembly, not to mention that I didn't know that every Gameboy game was written directly in Assembly.

@Yorumi That's some all-encompassing work right there. In general I like to live in the higher-level stuff and design and be creative there, but on occaision, when I have opportunity, I love to take a deep dive into something specific and low-level. Nothing came of it, but the last time I did this was diving into minecraft-style procedurally generated worlds and all the fun lighting and efficiency issues that come with it. There's nothing like iterating through a complex problem and internalizing it all at once until it starts doing what you want.

That paragraph describing your solution is like a black hole I just can't get sucked into right now. I shall stop reading it. lol.

@Waninoko yes, it's very interesting to compare the Genesis and SNES. There are several small details of each system's design that make a direct comparison of the hardware difficult. For example, the SNES has the odd sprite restriction of only being able to display two sizes at a time, likely forcing developers to use larger sprites than necessary and taking up more space on the cart, which was quite limited at the time. It's interesting to look back and see how such small design changes might have made big differences.

@liveswired The Turbo Express made the GG's battery life seem absolutely remarkable. lol And don't forget about the Wonderswan, it made the GB's battery life seem like the Turbo Express'. lol

@LemonSlice Disagree. Yes the N64 has examples of muddy graphics as much as the PS1 had ones that were so highly pixellated that you could barely work out what was on screen.

Now find me a 3D polygonal game with graphics, textures and clarity that comes anywhere near to Rare's, Factor 5, Iguana, Ubisoft, even EA's finest. Oh you can't. Why? Because the N64 was the 3D powerhouse of its era, processing world's many times more complex than the 32bit competition putting you into the action. Now yes the PS1 had pretty pre rendered games, FMV sequences etc, CD Sound. But it's all personal taste. To be honest you need to own both an N64 and PS1 if you are serious about that gen.

You've fallen for the greatest misinformation campaign waged by PS1 fanboys in history.

@liveswired I'm not talking about prerendered backgrounds and sprites or FMV cutscenes, I'm talking about the polygonal 3D graphics and how much they rocked on the PS1, and how important they were in preserving the skill of pixel art into the 3D era. Even the PS2 made careful pixel by pixel texturing very worthwhile.