Teardown: Nintendo Game Boy

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the launch of Nintendo’s original Game Boy, though it did not make its way to Europe until 1990. At around £70 (about twice that in today’s prices), it put high technology in your pocket at a cost that mobile phones were still some way from matching. And it saw off other contemporary entries in the handheld space, including Apple’s Newton.

If you are sitting on a beach playing Candy Crush on your smartphone, hopefully you will not mind this summertime trip down memory lane, thanks to iFixit marking the anniversary with a special teardown.

Before getting into what its team discovered, it is worth noting that the Game Boy was designed to be cheap and accessible from its conception. It began life code-named ‘DMG’ – ‘dot matrix game’.

The project leader, Gunpei Yokoi, famously decreed that the console needed a design based on “lateral thinking with withered technology”. He wanted his engineers to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts in innovative ways.

To that end, the original Game Boy had no backlight. It was powered by a 4.19MHz 8-bit Sharp processor that was a stripped-down analogue of the Intel 8080. Memory was 8kB of Window RAM and 8kB of VRAM. Power came from four AA batteries or a mains adapter. Heady stuff.

Nintendo was not producing the first handheld, cartridge-based gaming device, so one other important choice Yokoi and his team made was to put the Sharp processor inside the console. That might seem like an obvious decision today, but in the late 1980s, it gave Nintendo another advantage over rivals.

An earlier console from US games specialist Milton Bradley put the processor inside each game cartridge. That might have kept the platform cost down, but it made the games themselves more expensive and/or shrank your potential margins on them.

Yokoi and Nintendo could also see that the market for fixed-game handheld consoles – or those that might limit purchases from customers – needed to evolve. He had previously led the development of the company’s pre-loaded Game & Watch range. It was launched in 1980 and showing signs of age.

You can see echoes of Yokoi’s approach, even after his tragic death in a 1997 highway accident, in the Wii. It might have been less technologically powerful than its PlayStation and Xbox competitors, but again harnessed a lot of COTS parts (particularly for the Wiimote controller wand) to offer a broad range of gaming experiences at a lower price.

So, what happened when iFixit opened up the Game Boy? On the outside, they did encounter a nod to the ‘Keep Out’ techniques applied today. “The case is held together by six tri-point Y1 screws. Even back in 1989, Nintendo thought traditional screws might be too easy for us tinkerers,” its engineers say.

They also found that a number of components had been soldered in place, including the display, headphone jack, speaker wires and ports. That would make repair-over-replacement tricky even for Nintendo, though that approach was more ‘acceptable’ in an age yet to confront the issue of electronic waste.

Also in Nintendo’s defence, the company did not skimp when it came to the enclosure. The Game Boy was a handheld and the design team recognised the need for a suitable level of ruggedness in the enclosure and on the printed circuit boards.

Once inside, iFixit nevertheless found common Phillips screws holding the boards in place, and most elements were relatively easy to remove. Its designers did not go as far out of their way as many of their contemporaries to keep proprietary control of the product throughout its lifespan (and, interesting side point, the Nintendo helpline telephone number on the rear panel apparently still works today).

Of course, today’s engineers are charged with delivering far more functionality and therefore placing more components into essentially the same form factor, even allowing for SoC integration. Moreover, the original Game Boy weighed 220g without batteries and 394g with them; an iPhone XR weighs 194g including its lithium cell.

Yet for all that, the Game Boy emerges from its belated teardown as a study in elegance and simplicity – and that simplicity has some other current echoes.

Unused, boxed Game Boys are said to be available on eBay for prices of around and sometimes above £500. A used console in working order with a healthy collection of cartridges can attract bids in the lower hundreds.

Nintendo shipped more than 200 million Game Boys during the line’s life in various standard formats from 1989 to 2003, and more than 100 million of the original form factor with B&W and later colour screens. There remain a lot of fanboys out there, so repairability can potentially be very profitable (good luck with the obsolete silicon though).

At the same time, we have progressed so far with integration that, thanks to one Chinese entrepreneur, you can now buy a combined pre-loaded Game Boy-clone (299 games) and 10,000mAh power bank in a rubberised case. It costs about £25, though you hope all the necessary licences are in place.

That really is Moore’s Law in action. On a personal note, I’d happily swap Candy Crush for Galaga even today. 

Key components

Exploded view

1. Front assembly
2. LCD and display/speaker board
3. Motherboard
4. Rear assembly
5. Controller pads
6. Batteries
7. Battery-compartment cover

Motherboard

8. CPU, Sharp
9. Memory (VRAM), LSI Logic
10. Memory (SRAM), LSI Logic
11. Amplifier, Sharp

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the launch of Nintendo’s original Game Boy, though it did not make its way to Europe until 1990. At around £70 (about twice that in today’s prices), it put high technology in your pocket at a cost that mobile phones were still some way from matching. And it saw off other contemporary entries in the handheld space, including Apple’s Newton.

If you are sitting on a beach playing Candy Crush on your smartphone, hopefully you will not mind this summertime trip down memory lane, thanks to iFixit marking the anniversary with a special teardown.

Before getting into what its team discovered, it is worth noting that the Game Boy was designed to be cheap and accessible from its conception. It began life code-named ‘DMG’ – ‘dot matrix game’.

The project leader, Gunpei Yokoi, famously decreed that the console needed a design based on “lateral thinking with withered technology”. He wanted his engineers to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts in innovative ways.

To that end, the original Game Boy had no backlight. It was powered by a 4.19MHz 8-bit Sharp processor that was a stripped-down analogue of the Intel 8080. Memory was 8kB of Window RAM and 8kB of VRAM. Power came from four AA batteries or a mains adapter. Heady stuff.

Nintendo was not producing the first handheld, cartridge-based gaming device, so one other important choice Yokoi and his team made was to put the Sharp processor inside the console. That might seem like an obvious decision today, but in the late 1980s, it gave Nintendo another advantage over rivals.

An earlier console from US games specialist Milton Bradley put the processor inside each game cartridge. That might have kept the platform cost down, but it made the games themselves more expensive and/or shrank your potential margins on them.

Yokoi and Nintendo could also see that the market for fixed-game handheld consoles – or those that might limit purchases from customers – needed to evolve. He had previously led the development of the company’s pre-loaded Game & Watch range. It was launched in 1980 and showing signs of age.

You can see echoes of Yokoi’s approach, even after his tragic death in a 1997 highway accident, in the Wii. It might have been less technologically powerful than its PlayStation and Xbox competitors, but again harnessed a lot of COTS parts (particularly for the Wiimote controller wand) to offer a broad range of gaming experiences at a lower price.

So, what happened when iFixit opened up the Game Boy? On the outside, they did encounter a nod to the ‘Keep Out’ techniques applied today. “The case is held together by six tri-point Y1 screws. Even back in 1989, Nintendo thought traditional screws might be too easy for us tinkerers,” its engineers say.

They also found that a number of components had been soldered in place, including the display, headphone jack, speaker wires and ports. That would make repair-over-replacement tricky even for Nintendo, though that approach was more ‘acceptable’ in an age yet to confront the issue of electronic waste.

Also in Nintendo’s defence, the company did not skimp when it came to the enclosure. The Game Boy was a handheld and the design team recognised the need for a suitable level of ruggedness in the enclosure and on the printed circuit boards.

Once inside, iFixit nevertheless found common Phillips screws holding the boards in place, and most elements were relatively easy to remove. Its designers did not go as far out of their way as many of their contemporaries to keep proprietary control of the product throughout its lifespan (and, interesting side point, the Nintendo helpline telephone number on the rear panel apparently still works today).

Of course, today’s engineers are charged with delivering far more functionality and therefore placing more components into essentially the same form factor, even allowing for SoC integration. Moreover, the original Game Boy weighed 220g without batteries and 394g with them; an iPhone XR weighs 194g including its lithium cell.

Yet for all that, the Game Boy emerges from its belated teardown as a study in elegance and simplicity – and that simplicity has some other current echoes.

Unused, boxed Game Boys are said to be available on eBay for prices of around and sometimes above £500. A used console in working order with a healthy collection of cartridges can attract bids in the lower hundreds.

Nintendo shipped more than 200 million Game Boys during the line’s life in various standard formats from 1989 to 2003, and more than 100 million of the original form factor with B&W and later colour screens. There remain a lot of fanboys out there, so repairability can potentially be very profitable (good luck with the obsolete silicon though).

At the same time, we have progressed so far with integration that, thanks to one Chinese entrepreneur, you can now buy a combined pre-loaded Game Boy-clone (299 games) and 10,000mAh power bank in a rubberised case. It costs about £25, though you hope all the necessary licences are in place.

That really is Moore’s Law in action. On a personal note, I’d happily swap Candy Crush for Galaga even today. 

Key components

Exploded view

1. Front assembly
2. LCD and display/speaker board
3. Motherboard
4. Rear assembly
5. Controller pads
6. Batteries
7. Battery-compartment cover

Motherboard

8. CPU, Sharp
9. Memory (VRAM), LSI Logic
10. Memory (SRAM), LSI Logic
11. Amplifier, Sharp

Paul Dempseyhttps://eandt.theiet.org/rss

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/09/teardown-nintendo-game-boy/

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