Gameboy to NES By Camerica

[Shawn]

Hey Guys,

 

Below is a dribble from a EGM mag that spoke about Camerica having a Gameboy to NES adatpor?? Anyone knw if there is any floatnig around and what they are worth? I would like to have more info on this thing!!

 

Shawn Sr.

 

 

The "GameBoy to NES" adapter, developed by Biederman Design

Labs for Camerica, is similar in appearance to a standard NES

cartridge, except for the inclusion of a game port recessed into

the top of the game pak, replacing the area usually sporting the

game sticker/logo. Little is known about the device, though it

supposedly gave players "the chance to display small screen games

on the TV like magazines do with expensive items called

WideBoys." It was not released, possibly due to legal action on

part of Nintendo, or an unreasonable consumer price point.

[Shawn]

[Blackbird]

http://www.planetnintendo.com/thewarpzone/wideboy.html

[Blackbird]

Hah, scratch that, should've looked closer. That would be the Wide Boy, not the Gameboy to NES adapter...

 

Looks like vaporware. Google doesn't turn up anything aside from that one article from Electronic Gaming #23, so not much probably came from it.

[Shawn]

Any more info on the Wide Boy?? I would like to get one. (I know there expensive, I dont care)

[johannesmutlu]

Am personally very curious how the biederman’s gameboy to nes adaptor actually works and if it did work,

for what i do know is that both the wideboy and unofficial retrovision adaptor uses a costum chip that converts those rendered graphics from the gameboy into nes tile sets on the fly while the audio get’s sended to the external audio pins from the famicom or from a modded nes,(us en eu doesn’t have ext sound pins on yhe cartride except on it’s expansion port)

 

 

 

but for what i have readed the biederman’s gameboy adaptor seems to contain a special costum chip wich translate Z80 code into 65X code sothat the nes will interpret it as a regular nes game (the nes cpu cannot emulate the gameboy on it’s own)

BUT it does makes me wonder if that would work because it makes me wonder if the Z80 cpu and nes 6502 cpu does support the same features or not,if not all features are supported then that means that only a limited amount of gameboy games will be compatible with it,

secondly theres the audio,the costum chip also has to translate sound commando signals from those gameboy games into sound commando signals wich the nes can understand,BUT since both the nes & gameboy audio chips don’t support all the same features from each other,then means that some sounds will be off or it will be sounding different,so i wonder how that would,ve turned out for each gameboy game once that sound is emulated?

sure that cpstum chip might could just take all generated gameboy sound and mix and convert into 1bit dpcm or 4bit pcm audio and stream it trough the nes pcm channel to get around that,BUT could the nes actually hando that all atonce?

and then there the video ram from the gameboy wich is 8KB while the nes video ram is 2KB,so there should be also a mmc3 chip added to it wich will beaf up the amount of video ram from the nes from 2KB to 10KB to store 8KB of video data from gameboy games right there,then by quickly bankswitch that 8KB of video data from gameboy games to the nes’ses 2KB by swapping video data in & out and from and to the nes 2KB vram to get around this limitation,

so in theory the biedermans gameboy adaptor might have work but maybe only with 1st gen gameboy games and in limited way’s

but we probably will never know,

still trough wether the biederman adaptor works the same or totally different then the wideboy and retrovision adaptor,it would be still interesting to see it in action.

 

 

 

 

[Rik1138]

Bumping a VERY old thread here.. 

But maybe interesting information either way.

 

Where did you read all of that about the Biederman cart?

I know the Wideboys and the Retrovision have the actual CPU from the Gameboy in them, so they are basically re-packaged Gameboys that just output video and audio through the NES.

Seems like they are basically just using the video-out circuitry of the NES and nothing else.  Probably wouldn't have been too hard to just make them 'Gameboys that plug into a TV' if they added a video/audio output circuit... 

The Famicom Wideboy does have two programmable gate arrays and a PAL chip, so there is some customization there, but not sure what they do exactly.

 

But converting Z80 code to 6502 code on the fly would probably have never worked (or worked well).  Likely the Biederman cart also had the Gameboy CPU in it and was going to work similarly to the Wideboy...