Gameboy Development Forum

Hi and welcome to GameBoy Development

I like the enthusiasm you show with wanting to get things started and your own game on the road, but you have to appreciate that it's a wide and varied set of tasks you need to complete in building your own custom GameBoy cartridge from scratch and without even moderate knowledge of electronics this will be hard!
I encourage you to maybe scale down a little, e.g. there was only one 8 MiB game released for GameBoy color ever, and instead build on top other people's work
You could start out using gekkio's excellent repository of various GameBoy development-(and-research)-related hardware here: https://github.com/Gekkio/gb-hardware

You might find the GB-CART32K-A or GB-CART256K-A good starting points for your endeavors! Once you get your own software on the GameBoy actually running you might look into branching off of those designs and maybe adding a RAM chip etc.
gekkio also published a number of documents related to this GameBoy research on his website and/or github page, like the GameBoy Complete Technical Reference, see https://github.com/Gekkio/gb-ctr, which should be a good starting point for you.

As for soldering, personally I prefer JBC soldering irons, but they are a bit on the expensive side. You might want to give cheap Ersa soldering irons a look or maybe go for the classic Weller soldering irons as they are readily available.
You won't find Memory Bank Controllers (MBCs) freely available. The one that are used in reproduction come off of donor cartridges so their supply is limited. People use CPLDs or even (fast) microcontrollers instead.
I documented some of the early MBCs along with VHDL descriptions of some of these over at my wiki if you're interested. And finally... why is everything so expensive? Because a lot of time, sweat and tears go into making these flash cartridges and the production runs are relatively tiny So be prepared

cYa,

Tauwasser

robinfaury wrote:

Hi Tauwasser!


I find this website https://jlcpcb.com/ and it sound great to create the PCB. I see ENIG sound be chosen instead of HASL. I don't catch why.
I do not understand, how I can send my gbc file in the microchip. Any pointer about that?

Thanks again for all those pointer!
Robin

probably pretty late answer for you but might be useful for others. ENIG finishing has thin layer of gold on open contact this helps to prevent them from oxidizing and work properly. but IMO hasl would work for self use prototype the same way and would be even better cause it s cheaper