Transcription

The original Game Boy 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 Game Boy 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 Game Boy 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 Game Boy. 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 Game Boy was almost half the size and half the weight of its competitors. Just under 15 centimetres in height and 3 centimetres thick. It weighed only 220 grams. This 35 year old console doesn't feel oversized like the mobile phones of this era. Game Boy 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 Game Boy so much smaller and lighter? To begin, one of the primary technological limitations of the early 90's were these things. Alkaline batteries. While our Gen Z audience may recognize these as the batteries they have to replace in their TV remotes once in a blue moon, these things were everywhere in the 90's. 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 Game Boy in the 90's. Large, bulky, non-rechargeable, and expensive. Minimizing 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 Game Boy used just 4. This of course made the Game Boy more compact and saved money for the consumer, especially as the Game Boy's 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 $2.30 per hour of gameplay. The Game Boy, 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 90's, 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 would have been closer to every day. One of the keys to Nintendo's success was recognising this limitation and working around it. While the Game Gear featured a fully lit coloured LCD screen, the Game Boy 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 Game Boy 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 the 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 80's 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 Game Boy 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 Game Boy. 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 would look even worse from the sides. When Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, tested a version of the Game Boy 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 Super Twisted Pneumatics. These screens used crystals that twist 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 Game Boy being a by-product of the polarizing filters tint. But how did the Game Boy create 4 shades of green? It was not possible to create these shades with 4 different voltage settings. Instead, the Game Boy created different shades by quickly pulsing the pixels on and off. Faster pulses resulted in darker shades, while slower pulses resulted 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 Game Boy functions, maths, and logic happened by simply reading or modifying those 64 kilobytes. Some are read from the Game Boy itself, while others are read from the inserted game cartridge. These 48 numbers, for example, are read from the cartridge every time the Game Boy 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 1s, we can make out that nostalgic logo, that dropped into the screen before every game. Inside the Game Boy, 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 even existed, to share that knowledge. Take the cartridge out and blow on it to remove any dust that may have caused faulty connections. For this byte by byte comparison, they could have used any numbers or 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 an image the way the Nintendo logo was displayed is not a very efficient way of populating the screen for games. If the 160 by 144 pixel widescreen 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 8 by 8. 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 32 by 32 tiles. But the size of the Gameboy screen only fits 20 tiles on one side and 18 on the other. So a viewing box had 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 visualized 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 8 by 8 pixel wide tiles that can be flipped or rotated. For larger characters like Mario, a set of 4 sprites were needed to make the full character. Once the frame was ready to be visualized, 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 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 positioning of the viewing window. This is the intro to the Link's 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, or the intro to some games like Tidus, were all created using this technique. Even racing games used mid-frame pauses to create 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 four 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. Let's create a song by sending the desired frequencies and timings to the two square wave channels. Now let's 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 memories to access a larger pool of data than the hardware originally allowed. The Gameboy's hardware could only read 32 kilobytes of data, but Pokemon Red and Blue had a memory size of 373 kilobytes. 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 at 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, 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 a 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 import or output information from the outside world was a link cable. Decades later, any device, even if only intended for gaming, will require some sort of account login connected to personal data, and will constantly transmit your data with a variety of servers. In this hyper connected world, collecting user data is big business. Data brokers specialise in collecting every bit of public information available about you to sell to marketing agencies, or in some cases, more malicious actors. Data breaches are getting more and more common too. 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