I will present “The Ultimate Game Boy Talk” at the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg later in December.
If you are interested in attending the talk, please go to https://halfnarp.events.ccc.de/, select it and press submit, so the organizers can reserve a big enough room.
The talk continues the spirit of The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk, which I presented at the same conference eight years ago, as well as several other talks in the series done by others: Atari 2600 (Svolli), Galaksija (Tomaž Šolc), Amiga 500 (rahra).
Here’s the abstract:
The 8-bit Game Boy was sold between 1989 and 2003, but its architecture more closely resembles machines from the early 1980s, like the Commodore 64 or the NES. This talk attempts to communicate “everything about the Game Boy” to the listener, including its internals and quirks, as well as the tricks that have been used by games and modern demos, reviving once more the spirit of times when programmers counted clock cycles and hardware limitations were seen as a challenge.
Damn, I tried to get a ticket to 33C3 and failed. Would have loved to meet you there.
OH YES
YES
FUCK YEEEEEEES!
This year’s conference is going to be amazing.
This talk attempts to communicate “everything about the Game Boy” to the listener, including its internals and quirks, as well as the tricks
Looks like the video is up on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CImyDBJSTsQ
Finest slides I’ve ever seen!
Cheers!
Very cool talk! Makes me wonder: does the hblank interrupt occur on the 40th cycle after the rendering where rendering is supposedly finished or when the rendering is really finished and it is safe to write to ppu registers?
Seeing this new and the old C64 talk, I wonder if there’d also be interest in a 1541 talk. Also, nice to see @monkeydom being involved in the Game Boy talk.
Though, I also did some work on the Apple ][ back then, learned how the 1541 works from the Apple DOS manual, etc.
However, many others may be much more entitled (and more knowledgeable) to talk about that computer than I would.
I’d be totally interested! And please let the talk will end in a rant full of death threats to Dave Siracusa 🙂
Very cool. I had considered previously applying for a talk with the same topic, but never got to it, so I watched the talk closely. It did not disappoint. It was both very complete, very correct and nicely explained. The only, very minor, factual error I could find was for the ld [HL-],A/ld A,[HL-] instructions which were claimed to be pre-decrement, but are in fact post-decrement.
Can you share the keynote presentation ?
The recording is available here https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8029-the_ultimate_game_boy_talk. Until now I couldn’t find anyone who has seen it and didn’t like it. 🙂
That talk was fantastic! I was especially blown away by the detail you went to in describing the pixel FIFO and the palette system and how and why it enables the Gameboy Color to have a few distinct palettes even in original Gameboy games.