Speaker 1: 00:07 [inaudible] Speaker 2: 00:07 Frank, I somehow convinced you to spend three hours on a Sunday afternoon with me. Speaker 3: 00:14 Sunday evening I put it off and I put it off and I put it off. And then finally it got me, you came over and we did some hardware hacking. James, that's kind of fun right up my alley. I think I'm, did you threaten to do this on the show? I think you did. I think Speaker 2: 00:28 about a month ago or so I threatened to do something by threatened. I mean I sat, I got this cool new thing and I wanted to do this and the only person that I know that has a soldering iron is my good friend Frank Kruger. So naturally you were the prime suspect to help me implement this for free and get a case of um, some Georgetown brewery but his offer. Speaker 3: 00:49 Yeah, that was an unexpected treat. But you offered and I took it. I'm like, yes, I am going to take free beer. So I earned my way through. I got paid him beer. How long did it take us? Like two hours. We should talk about what we did, but we had a lot of fun. I ended up soldering for a while and we ended up tearing apart a piece of plastic. That's how I remember it. Speaker 2: 01:11 Yeah. For all intensive purposes. That is what happened. Now I, you know, don't come from a hardware back end, a background where you do obviously as a electrical engineer, I'm a software engineer. We're both software engineers. But as far as our majors go and I have had the bare minimum amount of electrical engineering and my life I have soldered but I've soldered stained glass and that is very different soldering. Speaker 3: 01:36 Yeah. Um, I, I remember, uh, when I was a kid I wanted a solder and I ended up in the plumbing soldering section and I didn't understand the difference and I, I had like this giant heavy solder that you just could not melt with anything. I'm like soldering through really hard and I had to learn that there are multiple kinds of soldering out there in the world now. I've never actually seen your a stained glass one. But that sounds fun. Did you enjoy it? Speaker 2: 02:02 I did enjoy, this is in high school, so many maybe grade school, middle school before that is a long, long time ago. My, my parents have it hung up, I think at their house and looking back, it's not a good look looking piece of glass and I think they should probably just throw it away. I was like 12 at the time, so I could probably do a lot better now. But who knows, Speaker 3: 02:21 you know, I'm a terrible solder. Um, I have had the privilege of working with amazing technicians throughout my career and I was always the nerdy engineer who gave them a paper drawing, walked away for a week, came back and there was this gorgeous device sitting in front of me, like perfect solder points, perfectly constructed and usually note saying, your circuit was terribly drawn in like, oh, sorry. So, um, and then, um, uh, you actually don't do too much practical soldering, um, in college because you're out doing all your book learning. So we do a little bit in the labs, but it's not a good place to, so it's just taken me a very long time over the years to develop any skill at the stupid thing at all because it is something you have to practice a lot. Speaker 2: 03:09 Well you did a spectacular job. And uh, the one thing that I can do well, which is not necessarily soldering, but I can unscrew things, I can open up pieces of plastic and I can follow directions. So I sort of got us halfway there because what happened was about a year ago, I bought a old game boy color. So here's the setup about an old game boy color because I like older pieces of Nintendo hardware. And you know, the problem with this old hardware is that one, it's old. So if you were to buy something brand new in box, it's very, very expensive. They're very hard to find. So you've got to buy one used and then, you know, depending on who owned it or even if you know, an adult owned it, you know, those screens just get scratched up. So the game boy color that I own was cheap, but it was all scratched up and dinged up. Speaker 2: 04:03 So I found online, I don't know if it was on Ebay or some other reseller website, you could buy a replacement case for the game boy color. So the entirety of it, which is cool. So I bought this nice translucent orange, which I don't think it was a color they ever came out with as far as I know it could be wrong, don't quote me. So I thought that was one. Cool. Because who nowadays is building tooling for the game boy color, like replica of the casing, like one-to-one. I just thought that that was one. Amazing. Speaker 3: 04:37 So explain this one more time. Um, is this a modern company and a modern production run or is this some kind of leftover inventory from 1995 when the escape boy color come out? Speaker 2: 04:49 No, this is a legit company that makes a replica like GameBoy wow replacements and they sort of won up it because I also put a glass screen on it. I think the original is a plastic screen. I'm pretty sure. Again, don't quote me. Wow. Yeah. So you upgrade as you've spent 30 bucks, you get some plastic, $30 worth of plastic, and by $30, I mean $2 worth of plastic. Right? And you open it up, you unscrew, you have to have a special tri wing screwdriver, which I did not bring over to your house. And that was a mistake. Speaker 3: 05:21 No, and this is terrible. Um, folks, if you've never heard of this, congrats here in the real world. I guess Nintendo, the manufacturer, which also has good manufacturing. We should talk about the internal design of this thing. But the external, they use these terrible little screw things that have only three slots in them. Like who's ever seen that? Uh, I feel kind of dumb that I've literally never seen that. But this must be just, I don't know. You think it's security or are they just trying to keep kids from taking their GameBoy colors apart? Speaker 2: 05:55 I think it's just security. That's all it is. That's the cheapest form of um, piracy protection is change the screws. Speaker 3: 06:03 You keep all the, uh, what five-year-olds out cause I mean you were doing a great job. Uh, you ended up using absolutely the wrong tool for the job, but with somehow magic finger angling and grunting and twisting, you got them to open up. I was like, Hey James, I got a power trail. I've got a power trail. James, we can just drill through these things. That's what I was thinking Speaker 2: 06:26 and we were pretty close. I mean that was almost what we did, but I got it open and the reason that we needed to reopen it was because a year later since I had replaced the outer Shell, a company called Midwestern embedding and let me look, was it mid West embedded? They make one product or answer official sponsor of this podcast, m w-imbedded.com. They make one product based out of where are they based out of Iowa, Windsor Heights, Iowa. Who knows who they are. They apparently specialty is a PCB design. They made a single product ever called the game boy color replacement LCD module. Now this puppy, just like the expensive outer shell is an expensive LCD, which is $65 book, pretty much amazing. I proved it right away when it came out, I came out, I got the second order. And what's beautiful is that this frank is a beautiful led, backlit trans reflective 2.2 TFT LCD Day light visible with four x Integer Pixel Scaling and eight brightness levels. Frank built right in ou with up to three hour of run time on a 1900 milliamp battery. This thing is smooth and butter and that's what I ordered and that's what I had. You helped me integrate into this game boy color. Speaker 3: 08:01 No, you just called $65 for this custom made computer screen a lot of money. This is crazy to me that a small shop, um, would go through the, let's just call it effort of designing a PCV cause it's just coming up with the actual circuit doing the layout. That's a lot of work. Then on top of it, they actually got it manufactured on top of that. They had components installed to it and started to like talk about it. I am in awe of any company that can manage to put any hardware out there. I have always wanted to make hardware devices, but every time I've even started to begin the process, I'm immediately thrown off just by, well all the costs, all the like work you have to do to find cheap manufacturing, all the compromises you have to make for cheap manufacturing. So James $65 for that four x integer pixel scaling, which sounds very simple, but whatever. That sounds like a real steal. And uh, I think, uh, I think that's a darn good design and good for this company for making custom hardware. That must have been so painful. Speaker 2: 09:09 I agree. I, while it is $65 and I, I do say it's expensive because nowadays we think that this is very expensive cause we're buying huge TVs for so cheap. But these are mass scale. This is obviously not a mass scale Samsung Company. And I will say my last last company, two companies ago, Seaton, we built our own PCBs and we also did our own injection molding on our plastic and our metal. And this is why both of these pieces of technology, which has turned my $20 game boy into a a hundred dollars GameBoy at this point is very impressive. Building tooling, not only for plastic and injection molding is extremely expensive, but just doing board designs and revs on a PCB are also extremely expensive if you have them done locally in the states, which is most likely what you're going to have to do, um, when you're rapidly iterating on them. Speaker 2: 10:05 When you want to get a turn around a week or so, those can cost you thousands upon thousands of dollars. Whereas if you want to go do a PCB rev and ship that off to China and get it back, you're looking at months lead times to get that done. Um, this is from my knowledge of seven or eight years ago when I was in the game or so of doing PCB board design. And it can get very costly. So while I do say it is expensive, I think honestly is extremely impressive. And I asked you how much do you think they're making off of it and what do you think that they're actually making off this thing? Speaker 3: 10:41 Oh, there they're well into the negatives. I assume if you did the math, this is about negative $200 for each one of them. If you include design time and the amount of effort they had to put into it. So I hope they sell a lot of them and recoup some of that cost. But definitely your number one, what you are number two in line. Yeah, you definitely cost them money. Maybe number 100 in line. Maybe they'll start to make some money there. Oh Man. It's a tough world. I was just trying to think. Um, there's a really famous um, uh, uh, prototype PCB board maker that's online now. JLC PCB. And it's funny because they are a Chinese manufacturer, but they try to do quick turnaround times anyway. And I'm curious if, like you said, your knowledge as six years out of date. I wonder if my knowledge is 20 years out a day. I wonder, uh, I should just make a board and see how fast it is. We can do that for the show. Devote some show money to it. Frank's piece on my board. Speaker 2: 11:39 Okay. All right. That'd be like, this is going to be a very, um, uh, expensive, uh, project. But sure. Whatever you want to do frank. That's why we have sponsor so many pound. James. I thought you were going to get out of this with just some beer, huh? I did what I thought. Yeah, I will say so we opened the puppy up. Now have you ever opened a game boy or some other, Speaker 3: 12:01 I don't know. I don't think I've done a Nintendo now. I did have a modding thing for a game boy at one point, but it was this really big red game cartridge that you stuck in the back of it and it let you put SD cards into it. So a, you could put a lot of games onto one game boy. And so I did that, but I don't think I had to crack the puppy open to do that. Speaker 2: 12:26 Yeah. And, and usually as soon as you open the case, you know, you avoided your warranty. But I honestly feel like this is when you buy something, I feel like it's yours and you can do whatever you have. You want to ruin it. You know, by opening this and literally removing parts and replacing parts and soldering things on, I mean I was like 50, 50 like frank and just blow this up. But I wouldn't be mad at you because like, I dunno like taking a risk, you know, but the payoff could be super sweet. So when you open it up, the beautiful, I mean, do you want to just talk about the board design that Nintendo has put together here? Speaker 3: 13:02 Well let's, let's just say they have a nice simple design. You can tell that this is a device designed for mass manufacturing, but it has to be put together in the right way and that it has to be simple and reliable. So I think I was actually initially struck with, um, how simple the insights are. There is a main control board and that is Kinda right, right below the main screen. So all the kind of smart parts of this device are jammed up there at the top, behind the screen. And then the whole rest of it is basically just the, um, input interface. So what do we have two buttons and a deep pad select and start something like that, Ben whiles, correct. Speaker 2: 13:46 Yeah, that's it. No, that is 100% correct. Yeah. I know my name Depot d pads start select. That's all you need. Yep. Speaker 3: 13:53 Is that still, um, wasn't there a patent or copyright or a trademark on the d pad? Is that over yet? Speaker 2: 13:59 Nintendo created the d pad? Yeah, that's correct. And at this point, most likely it has gone well. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not sure if the d pad, if you have to pay an intender license rights or not, I'd have to look that up. Speaker 3: 14:13 Yeah. Either way we didn't pay those. So you open it up? Um, pretty standard circuit. The microprocessors really small. We've gotten used to all that kind of stuff and I think it was just a nice tight design. The buttons I was not overly impressed with. I was hoping for like good keyboard buttons, but instead you have the very much toy manufacturer of a big rubber thing with a little piece of metal on it and when you press down on the rubber thing, it's short circuits to Leeds on the board. This is classic, this is how all toys are made, but as hoping like Nintendo would actually have proper buttons in some kind of switching mechanism, but none of that nice and simple, Speaker 2: 14:57 nice and simple for all of the buttons, all technically eight of them. So up, down, left, right Ba start select are exactly the same as the little pieces of rubber, like you said, with little pieces of plastic that come out for the d pad, NBA buttons. And what impressed me is that every bit of a, the items that could pop out so the d pad could pop out, the rubber could pop out, the amb buttons could pop out. The cool part when you said mass production is that I was like, oh, I'm going to have to memorize where the a button goes, where the B button goes. I don't have to pull up a picture of it so I don't mess it up. But no, no, no. Nintendo designed it. So that little piece of plastic can only fit correctly in one of the two places, like it has different notches. Speaker 2: 15:43 So when someone puts them in, it can only go on one place. And I thought that was so cool that I knew that I wasn't gonna mess it up where I feel like if I open up monitor date items, which I haven't really done in a while, but let's say if I open up my TV or something, I feel like I'm going to, you know, I have to lay down every little piece exactly where I took it out so I could remember where to put it back in where this one was very much like, oh, I could just speced splatter these pieces everywhere and I'd be just fine. Speaker 3: 16:12 Yeah. Uh, you're really making me reminisce a bit here because I want everyone to imagine that once you had taken out those crazy screws with the try wing, whatever on them, this thing just fell apart. And just little pieces everywhere. It almost felt like a lego set. I was, I was kind of joking. I'm like, is this, you know, your first put together your own game boy, it's your DIY game boy, because they could have sold it this way. It was easy enough to put together and it was making me reminisce about like I've seen about the apple remote and how would we ever open the apple remote? Would we ever ever be able to get it back together. Now modern electronics or at least apple electronics are all squeezed together within a millimeter of their life, a quarter of a millimeter of their life and they're just not easy to play with anymore. Whereas nineties technology is Super Fun to learn from. Speaker 2: 17:07 I agree. I'm just looking at my stream deck that's here, my phones, any electronics on my desk, like there's no screws like I don't, I don't even know how I could possibly open them without completely ripping them apart and destroying them where, yeah, you're right. I unscrewed some stuff and it just all fell out and there I was. I mean, the beautiful part of this is there's two pieces of plastic in front and the back. They literally open off and then the entire board co it's one piece, the entire and a speaker, but the entire piece and the LCD, which has a ribbon tape is attached to, there's two pieces inside, three pieces. The, the three pieces actually the speaker which is attached via cables. That one's a little Janky. I think they could've done a better job there, but beyond that, the ribbon cable is attaching the LCD, which is flipped around. Speaker 2: 18:00 Uh, and the huge PCB board with just little places for batteries are there. And then boom, we were off ready to hack. You know what I mean? Like uh, you know, I'm like, ah, how do I take the LCD screen off and just like be a pop those little things off, you know, it's in on a ribbon cable. I pop off. What's cool about this translucent cases? I can see our work on it, which is fun. You can be popped off the, pop it off and put in the new one and basically done in quotes. We'll say at that point. But, uh, I was amazed that I was like, wow, this is so cool that I just opened it up and now I'm literally replacing parts on a 20 year old piece of hardware. Like that blew my mind. Speaker 3: 18:38 Yeah, thanks to someone. Where did you say in Idaho, I then spent probably a good year of their life designing that board for us because yeah, Lordy. Yeah, that was a, it was just a single ribbon cable connecting, uh, the LCD screen, which is very common. Um, but it was pretty impressive that it was a totally different screen and they were able to keep the ribbon cable the same. That means they had to figure out everything about the old board and figure out exact, make sure everything's terminated correctly. You know, these things don't work that easily, take some artisan shipped to it. So I just want to make sure everyone's getting credit while we talk about how easy and simple all of this was because we're standing on the shoulders of giants. But you alluded, I'm so replacing the screens pretty easy, but we had more work ahead of us. We had to do a lot of plastic cutting and a bit of soldering. Where do you want to start? Speaker 2: 19:32 Let's start with plastic cutting cause that's what we had to do first. Uh, now the cool part here is that since I ordered it, the geniuses, um, have updated the instructions with some community help. So the thing with this, um, LCD module is that it is a one to one replacement is about the same size. However, however they architected it, there's a few other ribbon cables that are in there cause there's more, you know, circuitry on this and I believe they also want it to sit closer to the glass. So you have to cut out two bits. Like you have to make the inside frame a little bit bigger. So kind of imagine making a cutting a square out of it a little bit bigger. Then on the inside you have to sort of cut out a hinge. And I mean this to me was a little bit of the harder part of it to be honest. I know that probably the soldering was a little bit more tedious, but to me this was trickier because we had like what, 14 different little cutters and we're like, you know, don't bend it too much and like better, you know, you know s you know, cut a little bit off and then do this because you don't want to break the plastic. And that seemed to be like kind of the most tedious part of the whole process. Speaker 3: 20:46 I thought it was kind of the fun part. Speaker 2: 20:48 I just loved breaking plastic. I felt a little bad because he did have that clear plastic. So every time you caught it it makes it like ugly. Look how it gets all foggy. It's not a pure plastic, it's not a pure crystal anymore. So it's kind of sad. I was like, oh I don't want to ruin this on James. And it's kind of annoying cause we just had to cut off like an eighth of an inch, which is really, you know, you're more just wiggling away. You don't actually get to cut or use a saw or anything big. You have to do it all tiny work. But I had fun. I had fun tearing apart your piece of plastic. I never do that kind of finishing work. I always just wrap things in electrical tape and call gun. So it was fun. Um, and I am curious if, um, we actually made an improvement upon the old game boy. Speaker 2: 21:31 Like do you think this screen is actually closer to the glass than it was before? Are We, where are we just making room for stuff? I, I think it is a little bit closer to the glass but I can't quote it. I'd have to really see a side by side comparison of it, but I have to sort of imagine that it is itself. Um, but the, the cutout bitten piece of it in general. That's nice. Is that, well it sounds as if, oh no, you have to cut out this big piece of plastic. You're going to see all this tedious, terrible workmanship that frank and James have done. That's not the case because the game boy when you look at it has a big black frame around it. So everything that we did is hidden a hundred. Speaker 3: 22:16 Yeah. Yeah. Um, but I, I was already ready because I was already like, James, we're just gonna paint it black. Anytime you do bad cutting or bad worksmanship just paint it black. No one will see it. So that was gonna be my excuse in your like frank, no need, we're going to cover it in black. So I'm like perfect. So Yep, all are terrible workmanship. But actually I think we did a pretty good job. I was pretty proud of us by the end for not having quite the right tools. We were able to do a good template and make the screen bigger and squeeze it right on in there. Fit like a glove. Yeah, Speaker 2: 22:48 I think so. And the cool part is that the original instructions had a piece of paper that you would cut out as a template, but somebody provided a 3d printable cutout that you could trace and somebody Speaker 3: 23:02 has a three d printer that was, so that actually worked out really well. So we used a three d print. Um, it was just a thin 3d print of a shape. And we used that as the template for cutting out. And I wasn't sure how that was gonna work out because we're cutting plastic and using a plastic template. Normally you want your template to be sturdier than the thing that you're cutting. Um, but it ended up working out great. I think, uh, I'm gonna do this more three d printed templates from now on, cut up all my plastic Speaker 2: 23:33 when I saw that and once we figured out how to use it, I go, wow, that's really smart. Like they should include that with every one. But that said, you know, the fight hours give us $60. And at this point though, now they do say that all modified modifications can be made with simple hand tools. And while I agree with what we've done so far, basically yes. And then we got to the, let's bus out some soldering irons and some solder and take the tiniest, tiniest, teeniest itty bitty tiny. They're so small, you can't even see them. We lost so many little cables and solder from the LCD onto the GameBoy itself. And one was required and four were optional. And we did all five and by we, I mean you. Speaker 3: 24:25 Yeah, it's about, no doubt we burnt your hands too. You played a pivotal role. Let's talk about this wire for a minute. Uh, if you're out there and you know I think about wires, this is like 36 or 38 gauge wire, it's ridiculous. You don't need that. Then a wire, I don't know, like I wish I had kind of read further ahead in the instructions so I'd know how this whole thing was going to go together. I would not use such thin wire because it's such a pain to work with. You can barely hold it in your hands and when you do it bends immediately. If you drop it, it's gone forever. It just disappears into the ether. A, I've used this kind of wire before. We actually use it when prototyping circuits and a technique called wire wrapping, so solderings fun and all that. But if you actually want to quickly build a circuit, there was a technique developed in the 50s of how to use poles and this very thin wire and this little hand tool to literally just wrap the wire around the poles of the, uh, you know, like the, the ports, the little pokey parts of electronics. Speaker 3: 25:31 And you would just wrap them so tight that they would do, um, a cold seal, uh, a cold weld to them and hold forever. It was an awesome, easy way to prototype that said, you're not supposed to solder these wires. They're too tiny. So this should have been not too hard of a soldering job, but use these silly wires. Speaker 2: 25:53 But we did it. And I kinda want you to talk about how this works because I don't really quite understand why specifically. I understand one was sort of needed for power and the other one's added this cool feature. They were optional, but it allows you to adjust the brightness of the screen by holding the select button and going up and down. And the instructions were like, take this part and solder it from here to this. Very tiny little hole over here and this to here. So I don't quite understand how you can randomly sought her wires onto a board that was made 20 years ago and then infuse new function. Like how does, I don't understand how electronics work. Frank, Speaker 3: 26:37 please explain digital circuits. They're so, they're so forgiving. You can do so many. But let's start Jay in. So the circuit board, cause we are going through this last night I was trying to tell you, um, why I was doing such a poor job soldering. I think I was trying to make up excuses and I was explaining how the circuit boards put together. You have your um, based materials, some kind of fiberglass, something. It doesn't really matter. You throw some copper on top of that and you cut the copper out. So it's just a little wires. Great. That's a circuit. And then you cover the whole thing in something we call a solder mask and that whole job of that. And that's the green part of a circuit board. And the whole point of that is to prevent other, um, other metal contacts from coming in contact with that circuit. Speaker 3: 27:24 So it's a safety thing. We don't want short circuits and we don't want things rubbing against these circuits. We want to protect them. So we put a solder mask on. So if you want to change how electronics works, it's really not that hard. You can look very closely at the circuit board. You can see the copper wires and if you have a good sharp knife, you can peel off that solder mask and you can cut wires or you can solder to wires. Or you can find junction points that are easier to solder too and things like that. So all we're doing is tapping into the existing circuit. And that works because you can always attach wires to wires. That's, you know, just how it works. Hmm. Oh, electronics. Oh electronics. Alright, so now what did we have? We had three buttons we had to figure out. Speaker 3: 28:17 We had up, down and select and yeah, so any button, you're basically going to need a wire for a signal to know whether the button is pressed or not. That's easy. So that, that was three wires. We definitely had to solder. The trick here now is that voltages aren't absolute, they're always relative to something. So how can we tell if it's a zero volts or five volts? We can't tell. They're just, you know, it's, it's not an absolute system. Who knows what that voltage is. We need another voltage to compare it against. And that James is why we had the fourth wire that VCC wire, uh, was in the circuit. Yeah. So I think it makes sense one way or a purse, sweat or button switch, whatever. Same difference. And then that one comparison wire, easy audit. So for all intensive purposes, the wires are going to the buttons sort of hijack the buttons and they say, Hey, when you know, send the signal that that these buttons are pressed and then do something when that's going on. Speaker 3: 29:25 And the VCC is a control that is helping with the power throttling or Yup. Yup. And I will even say hijack though. More like piggyback because we never interrupted the normal function of these buttons. We're just doing additional stuff where you know, we're injecting ourselves into that method call. That's all it is. Uh, we're, we're now, we did have the option, if we were crazy, we could have cut the old wire and then we would have had to do all the electronics involved with that button. But thank God this wasn't that big of a modification. Much simpler than that. Yeah. And we, and you put in a ground, Speaker 2: 30:04 which that one was interesting because there's already a ground and you piggyback our ground, which already had solder on as he soldered some wires to already existing. Yeah. Speaker 3: 30:15 Solder. Yeah. So the worst kind of soldering you can do to a circuit board, while the absolute worst is where there's already solder masks. So the part that you want to tap into is covered. That's the worst because then you have to cut away that solder mask and then you have to tap into that tiny little itty bitty wire. Cause they're all so tiny. When you make circuit boards like this, uh, if you're lucky, there'll be a via those little circles that you saw and those are fantastic because usually they don't put much soldermask around them and so they're much easier to tap into. But the easiest one, James, is when there's already just a giant ball of solder where you want to connect to, then it's just a matter of melting down the old solder, shoving your wire in there and keeping the two things or three things all soldered together. And we did a little bit of all those on this project. Each one of the ports was a little bit different, had its own little unique challenge, but overall fun, you're gonna run into that kind of stuff anytime you want to modify all the electronics. Speaker 2: 31:21 Yeah, it was a fascinating things to watch from the sideline, which was me just in the sideline. Sitting there and watching this all sort of come together on again, does the literally 21 year old piece of hardware x is released in 1998. Uh, and there are 120 million of these floating around, which is pretty amazing. Uh, but yeah, I mean, I thought that overall it was super, super cool and he'd gone to the Wikipedia page. You can take a look at this. I mean, this puppy for all intensive purposes, what we are soldering was a processor. It was a l r three five nine oh two from sharp. It's an eight bit Speaker 3: 32:01 dialogue, nine 80. I use that processor in college. I designed my senior project using that processor. Uh, you were asking me when we first started, if I'd ever designed my own circuit boards, and that was the very first circuit board I designed was for that processor. Ah, that's fun. Full Circle. It's a, Speaker 2: 32:18 it has an amazing processor speed of eight megahertz. Speaker 3: 32:22 How many more megahertz do you need? Honestly, like we can't even run 60 hertz video loops these days. It's 8 million times a second. Speaker 2: 32:31 Yeah, it's great. I mean, this, it truly does boggle my mind that, you know, this has a ram size of 32 kilobytes. Right. And I just think that it's so cool that you're right. I mean, this hardware that's in here, one can play some amazing technologies, but I'm imagining if I'm a kid of a build your own system or modify your own system, like he'll kind of right up the alley, get a little bit thicker wire gauge. But besides that, I mean Nintendo should solve these puppies. I would totally buy a whole kit that was build your own. You know, I think it'd be super duper cool Speaker 3: 33:06 and chances are you're not gonna break an old circuit board, but like you said, um, the best part of these all electronics is you can just go to goodwill and get another one for $20 or $10 or it might be in the free bin by now. Who knows? Um, I, boy, I'm trying to inspire myself now. Now I just want to go to goodwill and buy all the nineties electronics I can find and tear them apart and see what electronics I can get out of them. Boy, that was a fun project. I'm glad. I'm glad you finally got me to do it. I was putting it off. I was like, Oh James Speaker 2: 33:37 put me to work and I should say we did do it now. I did get a little gorilla glue on the glass so we had it. Speaker 3: 33:43 Oh, make a wrong, I forgot your last minute failure. We were doing so good everyone. Um, we hadn't powered it up yet though. So I cut to the chase. It worked the first time. Oh my God. Goodness. But as we're assembling it, managed to get a tiny bit of glue on the screen. It's like, and then it just spread all over and ruined your beautiful glass Speaker 2: 34:03 green. Yup. The Internet. The Internet saved us. You can use 100% what is it? Nail Polish. Nail Polish remover. Yup. And Speaker 3: 34:15 it's out. That is through super glue. Like nothing. So that was the way to get that off the screen. I was worried if it would work at all. And then the moment you touched it, that's super [inaudible] Speaker 2: 34:24 blue just vanished. So it was gone. Yeah. No, it's super, super good. This, the, the screen I think has a little bit of, you know, little bit of residue from probably the, that stuff's still, but that said, once you turn it on, since it's a backlit screen, you can't see any of it at all. And it's brilliant, you know, because that's how it is. Cause the, the LCD itself underneath is fine and then boom, it blast it through and you don't see anything at all. So it super good. Everything works perfect. Like you said, works very first time and I was, I'm blown away. Everyone needs to own one of these. If you have a game boy color and it's a fun little, you know, he had a kid, I could imagine how fun this would be to open up a game boy and like, you know, I dunno. That'd be so cool. Speaker 3: 35:07 Yeah. I think you still need the programming environment though. I'm such a programmer. I'm like, if I can't write software for it, I'm not interested in it. So I want your game boy. But I had blind people to write some really terrible games on it too. Speaker 2: 35:21 I wouldn't, you know, be shocked if somebody maybe had done that in the past. I don't know. I need to go look it up too. Speaker 3: 35:27 I definitely did. I did it. That's why I had that SD card thing. Yeah. It's just, it's been, that was, you know, 8 million moons ago. I think it's so old, but I'm not sure who's doing it anymore, Speaker 2: 35:38 but I'm definitely do that. So get the $20 game boy, get the $8 million screen and then the Dev kit. Yeah. And you spend so much money on it. The emails is build a whole brand new computer. I build for that. But Hey, you've got a super sweet, you know, GameBoy color with an LCD screen and new case in your hand and it works. So I don't know, see if, whatever. Cool. Frank, thank you so much for doing it. Uh, you know, before we get Outta here, I do want to do a little shout out. Frank will shout out. Ooh, what do you got? We have our uh, Indie, uh, of the month, uh, this month, uh, we decided that once a month we're going to do an indie showcase where any indie developer, you know, 50 bucks, you get a little sponsorship or read on emerge conflicts. Speaker 2: 36:21 We love the indie developers of the world. And uh, this one is one from our developer. Uh, Michael and Michael reached out and uh, he said, hey, I want to sponsor, uh, with my brand new app called Aussie weather. This is for all of our Aussies or Australians out there or if you're visiting Australia, if you're going down under to visit NDC, Sydney for instance, you need to download this app. It is easy, clean, simple, beautiful, accurate weather app for Australia, no ads, no fluff, just all of the beautiful weather that you need for anywhere in Australia at your fingertips, but will completely with Xamarin forms, with the.net core backing. It is completely free for capital cities or just a dollar 50 Australia, which is like 50 cents a month, uh, for all cities and push notifications and all of the data comes from the number one trusted place in Australia, the bureau of Metro, Metro, Metro metrology, meteorology. Speaker 2: 37:17 Good Lord. All you gotta do is go to Aussie weather.app or search Aussie whether in the apps are, I did it myself. It's super cool. You get all sorts of cool, awesome stuff including moon quarters and, and um, daylight savings time and all sorts of good stuff in there. So go download it today, Aussie weather.app and thanks for sponsoring this, uh, this one and thank you for being awesome and listened to the pod and we love all of you. If you're interested in doing an ad, read yourself here at any developer or a small shop out there. Go to merge conflict out of em. Tap on that sponsorship button up top and you'll be good to go. Yeah, and it's a great looking at too. I've been staring at the week forecast screen. Well composed, could look and screen. It's good screen. I like it. Good screen. Speaker 2: 37:59 Yes, go download it. Give it a go. And if you are going to modify your game boy color, let us know. I tweeted out a bunch of photos of the before and after. Well, the in process and the after, so I'll put that in the show notes for you to take a look at the beautiful game boy color and of course all the links to where you can buy the good nut goodness in which I did this with frank and frank. Thank you again so much for being my electrical engineer guru. So that's going to do for this week's merge conflict. Until next time, Speaker 4: 38:28 hi, I'm James Monto Magnum and I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for this.