You may have heard of the Pi Pico being released, it’s a $5 microcontroller from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Unlike their other offerings, the Pi Pico is not a single board computer, this device exists in the tech space usually filled with Arduinos, and is designed to be more of a hardware controller (typically with one task) than a fully fledged computer with an operating system. So what does this have to do with the Game Boy and GB Studio?
Recently, a user by the name 0xen had made some progress at getting Game Boy ROMs running from a Pi Pico on a Game Boy Color over on reddit.
While it’s still early days in terms of development, 0xen received some help from veteran cart PCB developer HDR, who has designed a plethora of reflashable carts and replacement Nintendo GBA PCBs. You can check out his GitHub here.
While the cart does not support a lot of features yet, there are plans for SD card support in the future. Providing a potentially more affordable and accessible flash cart (one that can be open sourced) is particularly exciting for the Game Boy homebrew scene. Updates and a release might take some time, but I’m very excited to see more progress on this in the future as well as similar Pi Pico projects.
Game Boy Enthusiast, Hardware Fanatic, Mad Man. (he/him)
