I WANNA KNOW THE NAME OF THE GAME [480]

Having owned a Game Boy for five years now I appreciate the reliable source of enjoyment and distraction it has been, and I want to keep that experience as long as I can without making any compromises.

My current console is a blue Nintendo Game Boy Pocket, made in around 1997-98. I love its robust build and frugal use of AAA batteries, but I am aware of its biggest limitation, an LCD display with no backlight that also slowly fades with age – playing the Breakout-like game “Alleyway”, I’ve often realised I can’t see where the bouncing ball is going, even when playing in a brightly lit room.

I cannot expect the console to keep working forever, so I decided to take advantage of the growing market in Game Boy clones, arising from the love of the machine, its game library, and the fact that Nintendo built it with largely off-the-shelf components – the Z80-derived processor found in the original Game Boy, Pocket, Light and Color is also found among 1980s computers like the Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC range.

My first option was to buy another Nintendo console, but not their latest Switch – I already own the games I play, so I don’t need to buy them again from the Nintendo eShop. I bought a Game Boy Advance in 2021, which also plays the original cartridges, but its screen is also not backlit – the later folding Advance SP has both front- and blacklit versions, and accordingly sell at a premium, just like the Japan-only Game Boy Light. Admittedly, I had not done my research, but the Advance was later sold for more than I bought it for, a mark of increasing interest and appetite for these consoles.

My next consideration was a refurbished console. An enormous demand has grown for after-market Game Boy screens – backlit, of course, but only able to approximating screen resolutions – console shells and components. I have no aptitude for this kind of modification and assembly, especially more delicate tasks like connecting a new screen to the motherboard, but the ability to order one, encased in exactly the colour of case and buttons you wish, was very appealing. It is an ideal choice to extend the life of existing Game Boy hardware, if you can look past the age of the motherboards – the last Game Boy Colour was sold in 2003, and the last Advance SP in 2010 – but the rework usually with its own warranty.

I then decided to at all-new hardware. A company named Funny Playing makes the “FPGBC”, a Game Boy Color clone using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip to replicate exactly the original machine’s processors, largely guaranteeing compatibility with cartridges and peripherals. Like refurbishing an existing console, you can buy the FPGBC motherboard, pre-assembled with screen attached, and build your own case around it, or have one built for you. Aside from its using a rechargeable battery, this is the closest available console to the original Game Boy, the perfect choice if you simply want to play games using all-new hardware.

The only reason I didn’t go for the FPGBC myself was seeing the price tick up when I looked at assembly options for the case and button colours I wanted, followed by the cost and time of delivery, because it pushed my expected cost towards the Analogue Pocket, a console produced in limited numbers since 2021 that, while assuming a mostly similar shape and button layout to a Game Boy, uses its FPGA chip to replicate the Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, PC Engine and Neo Geo Pocket, although the extra cost of cartridge adaptors made this less desirable. Furthermore, its continued use of a plastic case and similar rechargeable battery like the FPGBC, while costing up to twice as much as one, soured me a bit, high-resolution screen or not – their shipping costs from the US to the UK didn’t help either.

My final option was announced in June 2024. The ModRetro Chromatic comes from Palmer Luckey, a former virtual reality headset designer who got into modifying Game Boys as a teenager, and now owns a company named Anduril, making armed drones – this fact might be a deal-breaker, but the Chromatic, advertised as a strictly limited “1st Edition”, is already sold out as of the time of publication, so it has already become moot. 

The console is built like a smartphone: a bespoke display matching the resolution and colour temperature of the Game Boy Color, rather than appropriating a screen made elsewhere, and encased by sapphire glass; durable clicky PBT plastic buttons, and a painted magnesium-aluminium alloy case seemingly doubling as its warranty, in the hope of making it indestructible. It is completely overbuilt for its purpose, and more expensive than a FPGBC that could do the same job just as well, and while you can connect a USB-C cable to capture or relay the video from the screen, do you really need that?

I pre-ordered the Chromatic four months after it was announced: I surmised that if Luckey wanted to make money from it, it wouldn’t have been made the way it had been, or would cost more than the $199 asking price – I expect future editions will be cost-reduced, and more in line with the FPGBC. 

However, the 1st Edition might be the best Game Boy not made by Nintendo themselves. I bought it in “bubblegum” (pink, with purple A and B buttons), and feels incredibly solid and well put together, although heavier than I was expecting – with cartridge and AA batteries installed, the Chromatic weights 270 grams, versus 160 for a similarly prepared Game Boy Pocket. The crisp, legible and colourful screen is a revelation – the backlight is so powerful that I have it at one level above “off”, so I expect it, and the console, to last a very long time, although my main concern is avoiding any chipping of the paintwork.

In short, buy the FPGBC to enter the world of Game Boy gaming to avoid using old hardware, and if you want a Game Boy Advance, buy a refurbished console if you can, or an Analogue Pocket. If you don’t want to compromise, learn to compromise.

MAKE A BIG NOISE PLAYING IN THE STREET [242]

The Commodore 64 is generally agreed to have the best sound of any 8-bit computer released in the 1980s, and its Sound Interface Device (SID) chip is one of the most distinctive sound chips made for any computer. This is borne out through games like “Last Ninja 2,” “Bubble Bobble” and Elite’s “Commando,” and through the sampling of speech found in games like the “Ghostbusters” and “Impossible Mission”: “Another visitor. Stay a while... stay forever!” 

The C64 is sought out as a music synthesiser in its own right, and the SID chip is default sound that an 8-bit computer makes – considering Commodore sold seventeen million of them before they went out of business in 1994, that isn’t much of a surprise. What makes that sound so distinctive, and the SID chip so versatile, tends not to be questioned as a result.

In its simplest form, an analogue synthesiser, made by companies like Moog, Yamaha and Korg, creates a sound using a wave generated by an oscillator, which is then filtered and shaped to create different effects. The sound chips found in most 8-bit computers do not contain oscillators, relying instead on having an oscillating signal fed into it from elsewhere. For this reason, while you can still create different sounds by programming the attack, decay, sustain and release of the sound – known as ADSR, or the sound envelope - the sound itself is a uniform pulse wave, known as a “square wave” because of how it looks on an oscilloscope. Square waves are responsible for the stereotypical “beep boop” sound of an old computer.

Most 8-bit computer companies used one of two off-the-shelf sound chips, making them all sound similar: one chip was the Texas Instruments SN76489, as used in their own TI-99/4A, the BBC Micro, Tandy 1000, the Sega Master System, Game Gear and Mega Drive; the other chip is the General Instrument AY-3-8910, as used in some Sinclair ZX Spectrum models, the Amstrad CPC range, the MSX computer standard, and the original 16-bit Atari ST. Both chips have four sound channels: one to generate white noise, which you could use for rhythm, and three square wave tone generators. 

Meanwhile, Commodore designed and made their own processor chips, including for sound. The SID chip’s designer, Robert Yannes, was a musical hobbyist who wanted to create a high-quality instrument within a computer. However, some of the most sought-after characteristics of the chip came as a result of meeting a deadline. 

The SID chip had its own oscillator, but not only could it create a square wave signal, but it also could produce sawtooth and triangle waves as well as white noise, putting the chip among proper analogue synthesisers. Originally, this oscillator would have served as many as thirty-two channels, but time constraints led the work completed on the first channel to be copied, for a total of three channels, each with its own oscillator. Each channel can therefore be programmed to produce their own sound, using different wave forms, or they can be locked together. Each channel also had its own ring modulator, to produce additional effects, and their own separate ADSR controls built into the hardware, instead of attempting to replicate it through programming. Settings could also be switched almost instantaneously through programming, making it sound like you had more than three channels to play with. The SID chip also had its own filter to add in further effects. In other words, this was uncharted territory.

The C64 went on sale in 1982 at a price of $595. At the same time, the electronics shop Radio Shack sold, for $499, the Realistic Concertmate MG-1, an analogue synthesiser keyboard made for them by Moog. The MG-1 can only play one note at a time, with polyphony available as an effects option. The oscillators in the MG-1 were less versatile, assigned to certain effects that could be completed by any of the SID chip’s oscillators. The MG-1 has one overall ADSR envelope, when the SID chip has one for each channel. Radio Shack catalogues in 1983 still sold the MG-1 for $499 – the C64 could be found for $199 by the end of that year.

Adventurous programming of the C64 led to the discovery that the SID chip could be made to reproduce samples, often used for recordings of speech. Exploiting imperfections in the manufacture of the chip, and a bias in the sound output, you could create an effect that could effectively be used as a fourth sound channel, although one that was used sparingly due to the intensive processing power required. This is why the original SID chip, code number 6581, is more highly-prized: when the cost-reduced Commodore 64C was released in 1986, the new SID chip (8580) had been refined, making the effect quieter. Modern recreations of C64 hardware usually have to accommodate for which version of the chip people wish to use.

I had originally looked at all of this when The C64, a full-sized emulator of the original 1982 machine, was released in 2019. When faced with the decision of learning Microsoft Basic 2.0 to program the virtual SID chip, or learning my scales, I opted for a Yamaha synthesiser instead. While you can replicate an 8-bit computer sound using an analogue synthesiser, or a digital recreation of one, there is a certain timbre to the sound of a SID chip that means you need to seek out the real thing – many people do, judging by the £40-50 price commanded on eBay for just the chip, let alone an entire C64.

After leaving Commodore, Robert Yannes set up his own keyboard company, Ensoniq – the digital oscillator chip from its Mirage sampling synthesiser, which contained the thirty-two sound channels Yannes originally wanted in the SID chip, made its way into the Apple IIGS computer, causing The Beatles’ record label Apple Corps to sue Apple Computer for breaking their legal agreement not to enter the music business.