Reducing Power Consumption

The following can be used to recude the power consumption of the gameboy, and to extend the life of the batteries.

PWR Using the HALT Instruction

It is recommended that the HALT instruction be used whenever possible to reduce power consumption & extend the life of the batteries. This command stops the system clock reducing the power consumption of both the CPU and ROM.

The CPU will remain suspended until an interrupt occurs at which point the interrupt is serviced and then the instruction immediately following the HALT is executed.

Depending on how much CPU time is required by a game, the HALT instruction can extend battery life anywhere from 5 to 50% or possibly more.

When waiting for a vblank event, this would be a BAD example:

 @@wait:
  ld   a,(0FF44h)      ;LY
  cp   a,144
  jr   nz,@@wait

A better example would be a procedure as shown below. In this case the vblank interrupt must be enabled, and your vblank interrupt procedure must set vblank_flag to a non-zero value.

  ld   hl,vblank_flag  ;hl=pointer to vblank_flag
  xor  a               ;a=0
 @@wait:               ;wait...
  halt                 ;suspend CPU - wait for ANY interrupt
  cp   a,(hl)          ;vblank flag still zero?
  jr   z,@@wait        ;wait more if zero
  ld   (hl),a          ;set vblank_flag back to zero

The vblank_flag is used to determine whether the HALT period has been terminated by a vblank interrupt, or by another interrupt. In case that your program has all other interrupts disabled, then it would be proof to replace the above procedure by a single HALT instruction.

PWR Using the STOP Instruction

The STOP instruction is intended to switch the gameboy into VERY low power standby mode. For example, a program may use this feature when it hasn't sensed keyboard input for a longer period (assuming that somebody forgot to turn off the gameboy).

Before invoking STOP, it might be required to disable Sound and Video manually (as well as IR-link port in CGB). Much like HALT, the STOP state is terminated by interrupt events - in this case this would be commonly a joypad interrupt. The joypad register might be required to be prepared for STOP either.

PWR Disabeling the Sound Controller

If your programs doesn't use sound at all (or during some periods) then write 00h to register FF26 to save 16% or more on GB power consumption. Sound can be turned back on by writing 80h to the same register, all sound registers must be then re-initialized. When the gameboy becomes turned on, sound is enabled by default, and must be turned off manually when not used.

PWR Not using CGB Double Speed Mode

Because CGB Double Speed mode consumes more power, it'd be recommended to use normal speed when possible. There's limited ability to switch between both speeds, for example, a game might use normal speed in the title screen, and double speed in the game, or vice versa. However, during speed switch the display collapses for a short moment, so that it'd be no good idea to alter speeds within active game or title screen periods.

PWR Using the Skills

Most of the above power saving methods will produce best results when using efficient and tight assembler code which requires as less CPU power as possible. Thus, experienced old-school programmers will (hopefully) produce lower power consumption, as than HLL-programming teenagers, for example.