{"id":2779,"date":"2026-01-18T00:38:35","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T00:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vintage.bohemiancave.org.uk\/?p=2779"},"modified":"2026-01-20T00:50:54","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T00:50:54","slug":"nintendo-game-boy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vintage.bohemiancave.org.uk\/index.php\/nintendo-game-boy\/","title":{"rendered":"Nintendo Game Boy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Before the Game Boy, hand-held games consoles tended to be single-game affairs with specialised LCD screens. Nintendo’s own Game & Watch series were one of the most well known and Tomy were quite prolific, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nintendo released the Game Boy in 1989. It wasn’t the first cartridge based hand-held games console, but it certainly popularised the format. Wikipedia has a page listing all the handheld consoles<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Game Boy went on to sell over 118 million units before Nintendo released the backward compatible Game Boy Color (yes this is how it was spelt in the UK) which also went on to sell over 118 million units. Subsequent revisions then went on to sell in almost as huge numbers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hardware<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The screen of the original Game Boy was a 2.5inch reflective LCD screen with 160×144 pixels and 4 shades of grey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having no back light makes the screen impossible to use in dim light an it’s also a bit smeary – although I suspect games mostly took this into account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was at least one add-on that provided a magnifier and a light for the screen making the thing look really ugly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The screen is driven by a dedicated Picture Processing Unit with its own 8K RAM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Game Boy has a reasonable built-in mono speaker and a stereo headphone jack. It can play four channels, including white noise and short samples. It has 128bytes of dedicated audio RAM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To control a game, you have a D-pad with 4 directions, an A and B button and Select and Start buttons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The buttons feel good to use, but the D-pad is not analogue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The processor in the Game Boy was a custom 4MHz Intel 8080<\/em>\/Zilog Z80<\/em> hybrid by Sharp called the SM83<\/em>. It combines this with 8K of working RAM, 127bytes of fast high memory, and 256bytes of bootstrap ROM. The Wikipedia page<\/a> has more detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The software is almost entirely on the cartridge, up to 1M ROM and 128K RAM. This would be battery backed RAM to save game state. Flash memory was not a thing at this time (certainly not an affordable thing).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summary<\/h3>\n\n\n\n