Hey everyone. This is my first post here. Some of you may know me from the GameCube homebrew scene. Anyway, this post is not about the Wii or the DSi. It’s more of a vintage hardware hacking post.
The Nintendo Gameboy Color was released by Nintendo to the public in 1998. Since then no one had dumped its internal boot ROM (the first code that runs when you turn on or reset the system). After spending a few days glitching the GBC CPU voltage supply and clock input, I finally managed to get it to spew out the contents of this initial boot ROM.
Read all about it (as well as download the binary and an almost complete commented disassembly) on my website here: http://www.fpgb.org. The website is mainly a blog about my FPGABoy project, which is an attempt to design a complete clone of the original Gameboy hardware on an FPGA.
Or if you are too lazy to click on the GBC Boot ROM link on the right of the FPGABoy blog page, you can directly hop to it here.
I also dumped the Super Gameboy’s boot ROM about a week or so back, which you can also read about (as well as download) here.
I hope it’s at least mildly interesting news albeit being related to an ancient console. 🙂
Costis
8 responses so far ↓
1 pbsds // Sep 28, 2009 at 5:05 am
nice work!
But who still uses that? (except my sister :P)
2 Blackbits // Sep 28, 2009 at 9:50 am
Great news, congrats!
I don’t know why, but people sometimes forgets that ROM dumping and emulation’s main goal is preservation.
When some companies lose interest in old products and discontinue them there’s people like you to help preserve them and their history 🙂
3 ifish // Sep 28, 2009 at 11:11 am
great job
i saw marcan messing with the gbc clock but this is still awsome
keep up the good work
~ ifish
4 Crims0n // Sep 28, 2009 at 11:18 am
Great job mate, good to see some gamers still care about the classics 🙂
5 ChuckBartowski // Sep 28, 2009 at 3:36 pm
nice! But wait… isnt hosting that illegal?
6 SquidMan // Sep 28, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Awesome work, costis 😀
I’ll take a look at the disassembly, sounds fun.
7 crundy // Nov 3, 2009 at 9:02 am
Your website seems to be listed in a URI blacklist. Search for fpgb.org in:
http://george.surbl.org/lookup.html
I only noticed because it caused a ValiIE alert in my browser.
8 Ichinisan // Dec 1, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Nice work. I’ve always wondered when emulators will have the ability to recognize legacy GB games, like the GBC could do, and apply a color scheme to it.
Example:
Try “Metroid II” on a real GBC and observe the awesome and PERFECTLY fitting red/yellow palette. It could even use more than 4 colors by having one 4-color palette for the sprite layer and another palette for everything else.
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