Recap:
In the October/November magazine of Elektor 2000, there was an article from Steve Willis who made a cartridge for the Game Boy named GBDSO.
This cartridge made the Game Boy into a 2 channel oscilloscope.

These are it’s key features :

  • Dual trace display
  • Sampling Rate: DC to 1 Msps
  • Time Base: 100 s to 5 µs/Div
  • Inputs: AC/DC 1 MegOhm
  • Input gain: 50 mV to 10 V/Div
  • Line or chart recorder trace modes
  • Real-time FFT mode with dB scale
  • Variable persistence XY mode
  • PC link for screen or data transfer
  • 5 hrs operation from NiMH batteries
  • Averaging and Auto trigger functions
  • Reference trace storage

As you can see from the features, this thing is pretty damn cool.
Who knew the Game Boy could do even half of it, let alone real-time FFT?

The GBDSO was a kit sold by Elektor, but because this project is old, they don’t seem to be selling it anymore.
I’m interested in having one of these, so I thought: Why don’t I make one?


Elektor saves the day

I’ve been in contact with Elektor, trying to get the binary file for the EPROM.
After a couple of weeks of “I’ve forwarded your question to the tech. department”, they told me they had one EPROM left for the GBDSO.
They were willing to sell it to me for 10€, so of course I bought it!

I tried to read the EPROM with an Arduino, but something was wrong as the bin file I read didn’t work in an emulator.


PCB v1 arrives

Oh, how I loathe customs. 1,5 weeks after the PCB was supposed to arrive I get a letter in the mail from our wonderful Belgian customs telling me I need to provide proof of purchase for the package.
I ordered a few extra things from JLCPCB this time, such as:

  • Red PCB
  • Gold plated
  • …

Total price comes around to 30$. If you buy something that’s 22€ or more then customs can check your packages and you’ll be charged import tax and handling fees…

Anyways, once I proved the GBDSO PCB wasn’t a bomb and payed their ransom, I got the board in the mail another 1,5 week later.
You’ve got to love our postal services.


Assembling the GBDSO

Soldering the parts on the GBDSO was going fine. I started with discrete stuff: resistors, capacitors, …

Assembly 1

Then I started adding the diodes, opamps and other stuff.
Unfortunately I didn’t check the footprint of some of the ICs I’m using.

The digital potentiometer DS1267 is in a wide SOIC16 package. I have a normal SOIC16 footprint.
To try and fix this without having to make a new board, I bent the pins inwards:

Assembly 2

Assembly 3

It looks like it’s going to fit. I added some flux to help and then reflow soldered it with my hot air station.
Here’s the result :

Assembly 4

Assembly 5

As you can see, the pins are bent inwards and soldered to the normal SOIC16 footrpint.


Missing IC

Everything was soldered onto the board, except for the 74HC138 and the MAX114CAG.
Where did I put those? I can’t find them anywhere.
I checked my digikey BOM list online and they weren’t in there!
Time to order some ICs again…

Once I got them I soldered the 74HC138 without issue, but then I messed up again.
The ADC is in a wide TSSOP24 package and I used a normal TSSOP24 footprint.

Assembly 6

Assembly 7

Again, I had to bend the pins inwards to make it fit the footprint. Soldering this with the soldering iron was impossible, so I had to reflow solder it again.


Assembly done

The board is done. I found a 3$ delivered Game Boy game and used it’s shell for the GBDSO.
I was a bit rough cutting the shell, should have used the dremel for this.

Assembly 8

That small hole is too low. I checked my technical drawing of the cart and I messed up the distance from top to center of the hole…
I broke off the pin from the shell that should go in that hole and fixed the PCB in KiCad and the tech. drawing, but now the PCB can move a bit so I hope it’s still going to make good contact in the Game Boy.

Assembly 9

Unfortunately once I plugged it in, it didn’t work.


Troubleshooting, part 1

When powering the GBDSO up into a Game Boy, I had this Nintendo logo no matter which Game Boy I used:

Assembly 10

After a bit of back and forth with the guys on the gbdev discord and looking at the difference between a normal logo and the one I have, it came apparent that D7 is held low for some reason.

As you can see from the image below, those red pixels are missing if D7 is grounded.

Assembly 10

I’m thinking I must have damaged the EPROM when reflow soldering it, as it was difficult to solder and wouldn’t get into place.
But after some probing I found I had D7 shorted to GND on the ADC.
Due to the pin pitch being so small on a TSSOP I didn’t see the shorts, but managed to fix them with desoldering braid.

I only hope that I didn’t break anything on the PCB because of the shorts I had…

I also found out that the digital potentiometer symbol in KiCad, had it’s pin 12 and 13 swapped.
Unfortunately my board was already done, so I have to somehow swap those two pins. I submitted an issue and fixed the symbol in a pull request to the official KiCad symbols github repo.

The fix isn’t pretty, but it should work:

Assembly 10


First boot

After all this troubleshooting was done I checked short between power and GND, and then turned on the Game Boy:

As cool as this is, I wasn’t able to get any waveform on either channels so I’ll have to troubleshoot some more.