Andy, I did quite a bit of fiddling with a gameboy color and the advance. The free tools available are impressive - there's complete libraries for doing the hardware and graphics along with the 'c' compilers. The simulators are also quite impressive. In short, you can do some serious development quite easily. The older gameboys used a Z80 like cpu whereas the Advance and later have an ARM7 cpu at 16mhz. You can code download to the Advances via their built in serially clocked interface or as I did, purchased a flash cartridge. What frustrated me though was the power consumption of the XC95108 cpld's I was using for interfacing rendered the batteries of the gameboy dead rather quickly. The coolrunner cplds were still pretty new when I was doing this stuff - hopefully they'd be frugal enough to allow reasonable battery life. Pity none of the gameboys have a normal async serial port - that would make them a whole lot more usuable (for me at least).


Ralph - what you're proposing it not a trival exercise - converting the synchronous data to async has the major issue of speed, it is usually not wise to run async at much over 250kbit/s due to synchronisation problems. If you want to sniff real time data to/from the PS2 to the memory cartridge then you have to work at that speed. What exactly that speed is I don't know, I don't have a memory cartridge for my PS2 and I have no motivation to investigate it as I can't see any reason to do it. If you just want to read/write the memory cartridges via your PC, then there are devices that do it methinks. Using the memory cartridges as general storage (apart from a PS2) is useless as MMC/SD memory is easier to interface to, cheaper and has greater capacity. You've yet to inform us what the end goal is and why do it with a gameboy? Surely a PC is much easier! As for the utility of the Databoy, I'm not too sure. Its not often that I need to sniff serial comms and when I do I usually use a laptop - simply because it has the storage, the applications and I can write programs to interpret the data on site (which is usually what I'm doing anyhow as i need to communicate with third party equipment).

Not to discourage you Ralph, but I suggest you start with a task more suited to your skill level. You've got to walk before you can run. The tasks you've previously suggest are either bleeding edge or non trivial for even experienced engineers. If you want to play around with gameboys, by all means - they're great little devices and it fun to have them do things they weren't meant to do. But start off with writing some code to play tunes and flash colors on the screen first - that's what I did to get a feel for things.