2023-03-01

Picking My Dreams

I had a weird dream again. That is nothing unusual for me in itself, but what was unusual was that the LockPickingLawyer made an appearance shortly before I woke up.

Of course, I don't actually know what he looks like, so my brain solved that by simply placing me in his eyes. I could hear the voice and see the hands but that was all. He was going through a bunch of very weirdly shaped padlocks with bluetooth functionality, using simple keys to show how they didn't lock properly, and then throwing them into a big pile in the corner of the room.

There was some sort of reason for the locks being there, and there was a lot more going on before he appeared, but most of it I have already forgotten.

Game and Watch Again

Still have not managed to write much more about how to hack the Game and Watch. I have however spent a lot of time thinking about further things to do with it. First of all, a headphone socket. I spent way too much time looking at different sockets on Digikey, taking measurements and trying to figure out the best way to fit it. Thinking about small 3D-printed pieces of plastic and stuff. But it has not left the "thinking" state yet. Not sure it ever will. I can't really justify spending any more money on them right now.

I have already successfully changed the flash chip in both the Mario and the Zelda GnW to 64 Mbyte, and made a quick very sped up video showing the process. I have also played a lot of Flashback for MegaDrive (Genesis), but I am now stuck right at the start of level 4: Earth. I just can't seem to manage to handle the polices, the orbs and the little robot thing that all appear at the same time. There might be some trick to it that I can't figure out, maybe I should check a walkthrough.

A Larger Memory

Another idea I have for the Game and Watch that I will probably not actually do is to replace the flash chip with a RAM-chip. 8 Mbyte or so of PSRAM are available with the same pin out as the flash chip.

This would of course limit the device to the 256 kbyte flash inside the microcontroller, but thing is that some clever people have managed to wire in a microSD-card to it. There is however not yet any Retro Go fork that take advantage of the SD-card as very few people have done the mod. The downside of SD-cards also is that files need to be loaded from the file system and put in RAM, and the GnW only have 1 Mbyte of RAM in the microcontroller, limiting what game ROMs could be loaded and how much memory an emulated system could have.

When just using the normal flash chip in the GnW as normal, it can be directly addressed, so both program code and game data is always there without copying to RAM (although with slower speeds than reading from the RAM), making the limited RAM in the controller not as big an issue (unless the ROMs are compressed, this is why larger game ROMs can't be compressed).

However, just replacing the flash chip with a RAM chip would mean data or code could be loaded from files on the SD-card and put in the RAM-chip for use.

It's an idea. I don't know if anyone else had the same idea. I probably won't actually try it though, as I don't really have the time nor the money to spend on it at the moment.

In any case, that's all I have for you today. If you have any questions or comments about this, please put them on mastodon.