The original Gameboy was launched
in 1989 and was received with mixed reviews. While its success is
ingrained in our cultural memory now, when it was launched it was a
technologically inferior product. The Gameboy was designed
to be a cheap, low-powered, portable gaming system. It was limited
in many ways. No backlight for the screen and incredibly low installed
memory available for coding games. Review magazines of the time viewed these
features as a negative, but these compromises in design were exactly why the Gameboy
succeeded. This was a console for the masses. Even with these limitations, engineers
and programmers came up with ingenious methods to create games that have
not only stood the test of time but launched some of the most valuable franchises in the history of the entertainment industry.
TV shows, movies, toys, and even theme parks. This is the insane engineering
of the Nintendo Gameboy. The Game Boy's simple design borrows
much of its success from its older brother the NES. A straightforward
and familiar controller setup. Nintendo knew that size and weight were the most
important factors for a system to be portable. The Gameboy was almost half the
size and half the weight of its competitors. Just under 15 cm in height and 3
centimeters thick, it weighed only 220 grams. This 35-year-old console doesn’t feel oversized
like the mobile phones of this era. Gameboy focused on user experience from the get-go, an
ethos that has defined Nintendo to this very day. But how did Nintendo manage to make the Gameboy
so much smaller and lighter? To begin, one of the primary technological limitations
of the early 90s were these things. Alkaline batteries. While our Gen Z
audience may recognize these as the batteries they have to replace in their TV
remote once in a blue moon. These things were everywhere in the 90s. Costing about 50
cents each, or about 1.16 in today’s money. I spent every penny of my pocket money getting
these batteries to power my Gameboy in the 90s. Large, bulky, non-rechargeable,
and expensive. Minimising their use as much as possible was going to give
Nintendo an edge over their competitors. The Game Boy's main competitor, the Sega Game Gear, used 6 AA batteries.
While the Gameboy used just 4. This of course saved space, made the Gameboy more
compact, and saved money for the consumer. Especially as the Gameboy batteries lasted vastly
longer despite having less energy available. The Game Gear’s 6 AA batteries supplied 4.5
watts to power its electronics. Draining the 6 batteries in just 3 hours. Costing about
2 dollars and 30 cents per hour of gameplay. The GameBoy, with its 4 batteries allowed up to 30 hours of gameplay. It cost just
16 cents per hour of gameplay. Imagine being me in the 90s. Trying to explain
to my father, who remembers when someone got a car for the first time in his village, that
I needed money for a new set of batteries every two weeks. Well, for the Sega Game
Gear that was likely closer to every day. One of the keys to Nintendo's success was
recognizing this limitation and working around it. While the Game Gear featured a fully lit
coloured LCD screen. The Gameboy featured a monochrome screen that was capable of
displaying just 4 shades of green that were impossible to see in darkness
because it didn’t have a backlight. While the Game Gear may have gotten better
reviews with its power-hungry electronics, the Gameboy got the customers with
a system that drew just 0.7 watts. The Game Boy's engineers were determined to use
low-powered screens, and despite this screen being a huge part of our nostalgia today, it almost
led to the cancellation of the entire project. The best available low-powered LCD
screens in the 80s worked by having a passive matrix of electrodes
that controlled a grid of pixels. A pixel consisted of some liquid
crystals sandwiched between two perpendicular polarising filters. At rest,
these liquid crystals twist the light that bounces off the backplate, which allows the
light to pass through the set of filters. These crystals respond to voltage changes,
untwisting as voltage is applied, when this happens less light can pass through. Early
prototypes of the original Gameboy used liquid crystals that naturally twisted only 90 degrees
at rest. These 90-degree structures slowly untwist with voltage with the amount of light transmitted
being proportional to the voltage applied. However, there was a problem. This slope is
not steep enough. This was a problem for the low-powered passive grid matrix displays
used in the early versions of the GameBoy. The low-power screen used tiny changes in
voltage to differentiate between on and off, and the difference in voltage needed to
turn the pixels on and off was too large. A slight difference in voltage resulted in a
very subtle difference in the amount of light emitted by individual "on" and "off" pixels.
In other words, the contrast was very low. This got worse as the passive matrix
created an interconnected set of pixels where voltage could leak into neighbouring
pixels. So neighbouring pixels would also be slightly activated resulting in a blurry
image that looked even worse from the sides. When Nintendo's President Hiroshi
Yamauchi tested a version of the Gameboy with these 90-degree twist screens
he actually cancelled the entire project. However, a breakthrough occurred in
the late 1980s. SHARP perfected a new type of LCD screen known as Supertwisted Nematics. These screens used crystals with twists
between 180 and 270 degrees. These extra twists made a sharper transition
between on and off possible. This is what a super twisted crystal
transition curve looks like. The transmitted light drops off rapidly
with a much smaller voltage change. This technology resulted in sharper black and
white pixels, with the green colour of the gameboy being a byproduct of the polarising filters tint,
but how did the gameboy create 4 shades of green. It was not possible to create these shades
with 4 different voltages settings. Instead the gameboy created different shades
by quickly pulsing the pixels on and off. Faster pulses result in darker shades,
while slower pulses result in lighter shades. This is the same technique that
LEDs use to brighten and dim. We can’t perceive the pulsing with our
eyes, but cameras can pick it up. The quest to make the system as cheap as
possible of course created limitations elsewhere. The 8-bit CPU could only handle 64 kilobytes of
memory, less than a single frame in this video. Programming a game like Super Mario Land with so little memory available required
some creative problem-solving.
All of the Gameboy functions, maths, and logic happened by simply reading or
modifying those 64 kilobtyes. Some are read from the Gameboy itself while others
are read from the inserted game cartridge. These 48 numbers, for example, are read from
the cartridge every time the Gameboy is turned on and every licensed game cartridge has to have
the exact same hard-coded data at this location. This is the data it reads, just numbers. But, by rearranging them and converting them
to binary we can start to see a familiar pattern. Turning off the pixels with ones we
can make out that nostalgic logo that dropped into the screen before any game. Inside the
Gameboy, there is a copy of these same numbers. During the boot-up process, the Game
Boy displayed the logo stored in the cartridge while comparing it to the
one in the system, byte by byte. If a faulty connection caused a byte to be read
incorrectly, the Game Boy would not start up. Unintentionally, this sparked a
magical tradition among kids worldwide. A technique that transferred across
cultures and continents before the internet existed to share that
knowledge. Take the cartridge out and blow on it to remove any dust
that may be causing faulty connections. For this byte-by-byte comparison, they could
have used any numbers or any image. But they intentionally used the trademarked
Nintendo logo to curb bootlegged games. If you were an unlicensed game
developer, this forced you to display Nintendo’s trademarked logo, and
if Nintendo did not permit you to use it, you would be breaking trademark laws
even if the games themselves were not. However, using individual bytes to create the
image, the way the Nintendo logo was displayed, is not a very efficient way of
populating the full screen for games. If the 160 by 144 pixel wide
screen had to address each individual pixel it would need
a list of over 23,000 numbers. Dedicating a whole 35% of the available directory
only to set the screen makes no sense. The real amount of space dedicated to creating images
is only 12.5% of the available directory. But how did such a small memory create
graphics? The key here is the use of tiles. These are the tiles for the game Super Mario
Land 2, a classic Super Mario scrolling game. Each tile consisted of a square of 8x8.
Rather than building the frame pixel by pixel, The Gameboy system rendered the
screen in a three-step process. The CPU would first assemble a
background made out of 32x32 tiles. But the size of the Gameboy screen only
fits 20 tiles on one side and 18 on the other. So a viewing box has to be
placed on top of this background. This view box could move along the
background enabling smooth scrolling. It also has a local coordinate system
that allows non-movable information, like lives or scores, to be visualised
consistently in the same location. Movable objects like Mario or
goombas that can interact with the background have a special
name, they are called sprites. Sprites are just 8x8 pixel-wide tiles that can
be flipped or rotated. For larger characters like Mario, a set of 4 sprites was
needed to make the full character. Once the frame was ready to be visualised, the Gameboy went line by line setting the pixel
values on the screen. This is called a line scan. This practice was a bleed-over from the
NES, which was designed to be used with the tracing rays of cathode ray tube
screens. CRTS work by altering the path of a beam of electrons to hit against
a screen coated with fluorescent chemicals. This technique allowed programmers to create
animations. At the end of each line scan, Nintendo gave the programmers the choice to pause the line scanning mid-frame to adjust
the position of the viewing window. This is the intro to the Links Awakening
game. This was all created using a static background. Once the background was assembled
the tiles and the screen location were set, and the line scan would start. Here a pause would
happen and the viewing window would be moved a tiny bit. Then the line-scan would restart the
drawing and the end product emulated movement. The enemies in Link's Awakening like this or the
intro to some games like TITUS were all created using these techniques. Even racing games used
mid-frame pauses to create the curves in the road. This design ideology of simplifying
also affected the audio of the console. The Gameboy came with only one speaker
that was controlled by only 4 channels. Two square wave tone generators, one white
noise maker, and a separate channel that could load any custom waveform that is
stored in the game cartridge. That's it. Lets create a song by sending the desired frequencies and timings to the
first two square wave channels. Now lets add our custom chipped triangle wave to the fourth channel with it’s
frequency and timing parameters. Now, the final touch, a little
percussion to highlight the beats, made with the white noise channel. This style of music is a huge part
of our nostalgia and love for the Gameboy. I can hear the intro to the
pokemon games in my head to this day. But games are more than just images and sounds, they are fully fledged stories
that need data and space for logic. Of the 65,000 numbers that the Gameboy reads, only half of them are read from the cartridge.
This worked fine for simple games like Tetris, where the full instructions and data needed
to run the game was less than 32,000 numbers. Limited data was common in the 80's so game
developers developed a technique called memory banking where the game divides the data
into smaller sections or banks. Essentially, the game dynamically switches between
different banks of memory to access a larger pool of data than the
hardware originally allowed. The Game Boy's hardware can only read
32 KB of data but Pokemon Red/Blue has a memory size of 373 kB. The data
had to be divided into 44 banks. As the player explores different areas,
the game seamlessly switches between these memory banks to load and unload the relevant data. This is controlled with a small
chip inside the cartridge.
When the Pokedex was opened the chip
would access “Bank 2B” where all the 151 Pokemon had a 100-character description
that was printed on the screen using tiles. If the player entered a Pokemart
the chip would access Bank 1 to get the prices of each item. As the
player moves between towns, locations, or activities, the game continues to
manage these memory banks dynamically. The engineers in Nintendo made
a choice that allowed them to get consoles into the hands of gamers
around the world. For many, like me, it was their first experience of video games.
With a launch price of just 89 dollars it was significantly cheaper than either of its two
main competitors, and vastly cheaper to run. This ethos of player first is what defined
Nintendo as a company. While its competitors focused on ever increasing hardware specs,
Nintendo focused on accessibility. The Nintendo Wii with its motion controllers introduced
hundreds of thousands of older people who weren’t familiar with traditional game controls to gaming.
The Nintendo switch doubles as both a portable gaming console and docked home console, with
detachable controllers that have allowed me and my friends to have impromptu mario kart sessions
in airports and hotel rooms. Nintendo are masters of interactive design and the Nintendo Gameboy
was a generational defining piece of design. Devices like the GameBoy were
designed for a simpler time, when the only way to add software was
a physical cartridge and the only way to input or output information from the outside
world was a link cable. Decades later any device, even if only intended for gaming, will
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