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Dreaming again. Since I couldn't go to sleep last night, I had time to make a fake Nintendo Power article on Frank the Fruit Fly. It's a part of the guide to the game. I was working on the game and realized it should probably have a guide to go with it. So I was busy making one. I got a cover (page 1 of the "article") as well as the second page done. I kind of enjoy Game Boy programming because it takes me back to my childhood and the fun I had playing video games. I must have gotten my first Game Boy in the mid '90s, I was a late adopter to it mostly because of money, which seems weird because they bought me a SNES for my birthday in 1991 and an N64 for my birthday in 1996. But then my GB broke and I didn't get another one until recently when I saw one for sale at the video game store that closed down back in March. It's now a place to go boxing, which seems odd because it wasn't that big of a store. Anyway, I love the thing and use it regularly along with my GBC which I use to test Frank the Fruit Fly on. But I dread the day where I need to learn bankswitching. I'm surprised though at the amount of game I can put on one bank anyway. I have at least a half-dozen different screens yet I still must be at 32k. My plan is to make it 128k, or as NP would have said, 1 MBit. I settled on that because that's the average size of an average Game Boy game reviewed in the old NP issues from 1993-4 I have. I'm making the guide in MS Paint because it looks way better than what I could achieve in word processing programs. Here is a cover I made for it.

I got on it this weekend with this machine (and I am tired of scrubbing). I scrubbed the case down with heavy duty decreasing cleaner (says to dilute with water, bah who has time for that) and a bunch of paper towels and rags and a brush. That was fun once I did that I tore apart the keyboard, and did the same on each individual key, even more fun .. Friday afternoon I hit the dollar tree and got 3 aluminum baking pans large enough to hold everything, 6 quarts of 3% hydrogen peroxide and a bucket of generic oxy clean (which is good for the wash anyway). My stock recipe is as much peroxide as possible, and top off with hot water from the tap, which has as much oxy as it possibly can hold, set out in the sun and let her do her thang. The case was not too bad and after a full 9 hours in the sun, its pretty much going to do what its going to do. The keys on the other hand were super yellow and stubborn so they sat out all day saturday, overnight and all day sunday with a refresh in oxy. They turned out a heck of a lot better than they were, but they are still tan and still uneven, I will revisit this at another time in the process, but at least they don't look nasty anymore While messing around, its been my intent to install a SIO2SD internal to this machine, and the LCD for that will be a blue backlight, I think it looks good against the cool grey of the case. The power on indicator LED on this machine is very weak due to age and use, so since I am going to have a blue LCD screen I might as well have a blue power light ... but the default lens is red, therefore it would turn out purple, I do not want purple. I broke of a shard of thin acrylic (that I keep around for various things) from a scrap strip and started sanding, and sanding, and sanding, until matching the profile of the original lens, and I think that turned out pretty good Sanding Test fit Result