Just built a custom Gameboy Advance system for myself, take a look!

Bought all the parts from Handheld Legend, except for the glass holographic lens. The glass lens came with the donor Gameboy I bought off Mercari for $57. I was honestly shocked it came with one, the dude that sold it must have done a refurb on it, because the inside of the original Glacier shell was manually trimmed to fit an IPS screen. Very odd. But after cleaning the donor motherboard up of remaining flux and shining up the gold button contacts with 91% isopropyl alcohol, I put it all together. Even has a clean juice battery installed. I use a JPEG slideshow injector app to make the picture on the screen.

I do have a Funnyplaying IPS V2 screen in transit to me and I ordered directly from Funnyplaying's site to save $20, but I just got too excited and couldn't wait to build this. My GBA SP ( a shitty 001 model) will be getting the same reshell+IPS treatment next, but not right away. I also have a set of blue buttons and membranes coming with the IPS screen, as well as a protective carrying pouch.

View attachment 245979 View attachment 245980
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Silent_Gunner
IDK what it is, but there's just something about the OG GBA's design that I like more than the SP. Maybe it's the buttons and/or the layout?

It might be that I find it to be more compact than the OG Game Boy's that you see used in every project ever nowadays.
 
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Jayro
I like the horizontal layout, like the PSP. But it makes the triggers a bitch to reach compared to the SP.
 
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Silent_Gunner
@Jayro I think I would have loved it if someone took the A and B buttons, moved 'em up a little, and added two more face buttons, put a RPi4 in there (or maybe an ODroid-XU4 with some sort of converter to supply it with power), and then made it so that one could play a lot more games than just whatever's made for the GBA and some NES games.

I get that the OG GB is more "classic," but the aesthetics and the design of the GBA have more of an appeal to me. IDK, maybe it's just nostalgia talking.
 
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Jayro
I don't like how HOT the XU4 gets, even with proper cooling. It's easily the most difficult of my SBCs to keep cool. Not even sure what I wanna do with it yet. Might give it NAS duties down the road.
 
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Silent_Gunner
And that's cool, but how does CM4 compare to, say, the RPi4 currently collecting dust in my PiBoy for the purposes of emulation and playing whatever ports can be played with a controller on these devices, you know?

The XU4, when using Open Retro Arena's implementation of Retropie, seems to be slightly more capable of handling demanding situations in DC games via lr-flycast than the RPi4 last I checked. But they both come real close in that regard.
 
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Jayro
As far as I know, the CM4 is exactly a Pi 4, just with different configurations you can buy, and only comes with USB 2.0 (which is fine for retro games).
 
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Jayro
Made some new picture to display on my modded Gameboys when taking pics. I made the Gameboy Color pic in Photoshop and imported it as a titlescreen using Gameboy Studio 2, and saved it as a GBC ROM. Also works on monochrome Gameboys, without the color pattern.

The Gameboy Advance pic was a BMP file I made in Photoshop, and imported to GBA Jpeg Packer, exported as a single picture slideshow GBA ROM.

My next goal is to make my own GB/GBC test cartridge ROM, just for fun. (I really don't care for the official one by Nintendo, I want one where you can press buttons continuously as you wish, not following a script that eventually ends. And I'll hopefully be able to include a few test patters, to look for dead pixels/lines (and fixed-pixel aspect ratios when using emulators).

JqFRIj9.jpg


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