This 2024 blog post<\/a> from software engineer Linh Pham does a much better job than I ever could at laying out the actual nuts and bolts of how this compares not only to the OEM chipset, but the Analogue Pocket at well. I think I agree with his conclusion – it’s not perfect, and there are better options in this price range for a general retro gaming handheld, but it’s good enough to be worth the money and very “fresh out of the box” feeling if that matters to you. You can buy it assembled if you’re a lazy bitch like me but if you have basic soldering skills, I recommend you save $20-$30 and just buy the kit. FunnyPlaying sells every component of the console – fully-working mainboard, speaker, rechargeable battery, screen, shell, buttons, and membranes. Fucking gorgeous. I’ll definitely be picking up one or two more of these kits in future just to have different color options to match my outfits (I only have one outfit, it’s a featureless black t-shirt and black jeans).<\/p>\n\n\n\nI have experienced very few issues playing authentic Nintendo cartridges and still haven’t encountered anything game-breaking on the bootlegs either. I will say that Mario’s Picross is one game that requires you to toggle the FPGBC’s built-in color fix setting, and a lot of games benefit from the optional frame blending so I leave that on as well. One thing I do find slightly irritating is the display, and I think it’s worth taking a close look at why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nThe FPGBC has six display modes as of the current firmware v1.14. Three of them are for the FPGBC’s default color palette, and three are more washed out in an attempt to look closer to the original console. Within those two sets of three, one display mode is full-screen, one is pixel-perfect, and one is pixel-perfect with a grid overlay to simulate the original display’s pixel separation. The different color modes are more or less subjective and I have a tenuous frame of reference on how authentic any of that is, let’s just say your milage may vary. My nitpicks really crop up, however, when we look at the differences between the full-screen display, pictured above on the left, and the pixel-perfect view seen on the right. The colors are vibrant and more or less even, it’s a cheapo display and clearly not purpose-made for this application, but it looks great in full screen until it doesn’t. The display’s resolution is not divisible by the Game Boy Color’s original resolution, so each “pixel” is actually comprised of many many smaller pixels are working together to make the same square shape. Since the resolution isn’t cleanly divisible, some “pixels” appear wider than others. In both Dragon Warrior III and Pok\u00e9mon Crystal, this issue becomes very clear, because the player sprite inhabits just the right spot on the screen where you can always tell that one of their eyes is wider than the other. They look crazed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the issue that pixel-perfect display options exist to resolve. The image is resized to take up an evenly-divisible portion of the screen and all pixels become perfectly square and uniform. This may sound like splitting hairs but the cumulative effect of the display being “perfect” is really impactful. But the image shrinks, and since this isn’t an OLED display you can tell that there’s a border around the game. Each pixel is exactly square, and the games look fantastic, but look again at the image on the right. For some reason, the pixel-perfect display mode has the image scooted up almost but not quite to the top edge of the display. Why they chose to do this instead of centering it is beyond me and honestly, this sticking point is my biggest complaint about the device. Battery life is great, USBC rechargeable, lasts all day. Buttons feel great. But that alignment issue is diabolical. It makes me fucking sick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So anyway I got so many goddamned games, here’s a list:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\nLegend of Zelda Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons (Got the Japanese versions of these to save a little bit of money, just started playing them and really enjoying them. I grew up playing Link’s Awakening so this combat feels real good.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n Mario Golf and Mario Tennis (Japanese language copies again to save some money, I almost wish I’d splashed out for English cos there’s more reading than I thought there would be. For the record, Mario Golf for the Game Boy Color is my favorite sports game of all time.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n
\nKirby Tilt and Tumble (Yep, Japanese. I don’t need to be able to read this one! Dead simple game. But it’s got MOTION CONTROLS! On the GBC! And it’s a special white PCB with a pink shell, who can resist that?)<\/li>\n\n\n\n Pok\u00e9mon Pinball (Another sick one-off gimmick cartridge – this one’s got a rumble pack and it’s surprisingly rumbly. The game itself is good but feels like dog pants compared to the GBA sequel.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\nYu-Gi-Oh! Dark Duel Stores (This one’s alright? I’m trying to figure out its quirks – it seems like type advantage is a really big deal and you can make your own custom monster cards? Why aren’t any of the Yu-Gi-Oh! games I try just normal versions of the TCG T-T)<\/li>\n\n\n\n Mary-Kate and Ashley Crush Course (What the fuck, this isn’t a racing game? It’s a… It’s a Mario Party knockoff? I bought this on a whim because it was dirt cheap and I feel like it needs to be locked in a plastic cell like Magneto or Hannibal Lecter. Never to be freed.) <\/li>\n\n\n\n Game and Watch Gallery 1 and 3 (These are undisputable classics and amazing for short bursts. Weirdly enough, even though these both came from different sources, these were the two games that arrived needing a new save battery. I want to complete the trilogy!)<\/li>\n\n\n\n Hamster Paradise 3 (Got a Japanese copy again, not to save money but because this one was never localized! This seems a lot like a spiritual predecessor to Nintendogs and gives you a TON to do. Minigames, shopping, buying toys, going to the park, going on walks. With a hamster. Must be a safe town!)<\/li>\n\n\n\n Tamagotchi (Eh… It’s alright. Pales in comparison to Hamster Paradise 3. Too similar to an actual Tamagotchi but without the always-on appeal.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n Mario’s Picross (Certified hood classic, fantastic way to play a fantastic traditional puzzle game. Kinda like sudoku and paint-by-numbers had a baby. And I just found out there’s a sequel to this! There’s also a GBC Pok\u00e9mon Picross game that was fully developed and finished, but never released – it’s out there on the web, you should play it! The story of how it was recovered is cool. When my copy of Mario’s Picross arrived, it had three maxed-out save files – I cleared it and intend to restore it to having three complete saves again one day!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\nNow this is clearly an irresponsible number of games to buy in a month and honestly, as I develop an understanding of the price market, I overpaid for a couple of these for sure. But if you look back up all the way at the top, you may notice that there are a few games up there that I haven’t talked about yet. Keen readers may have noticed that they aren’t even real games. Let’s talk about bootlegs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Oh Comrade Mario. You fucking freak of nature. It is clear from the dull sheen of your eyes that the war has not been kind to you. By God, what have you seen? What have you done<\/em>? Anyway it’s like… A romhack of Mario Land. It doesn’t save. Is it supposed to? It doesn’t save my high scores. And the cartridge is distinctly purple-ish when seen IRL.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\nFinally, we’ve got the Pok\u00e9mon bootlegs. Now I knew I wanted to play some Pok\u00e9mon on my shiny new Game Boy Color. But I also knew I did not want to pay $175 for a copy of Crystal. At least not before trying the alternative. On AliExpress, you can buy a BUNCH of absolutely buckwild Pok\u00e9mon romhacks for a variety of consoles. Definitely do this responsibly – especially with romhacks you love, make it a point to learn about the original creator and throw em a fiver or something. You could even go as far as to get a GB Operator and some blank carts and make your own romhack carts, or play them off of a flashcart. But I wanted something specific. Pictured above are three romhacks, and they each represent a fundamental segment of the Pok\u00e9mon bootleg ecosystem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Center, we’ve got Pok\u00e9mon Crystal, the game that originally set me off on this little escapade. On my emulation device, since it turns all the way off when I’m not playing it, Pok\u00e9mon Crystal’s real-time clock features like the day\/night cycle, phone calls, berry growth, and re-battling didn’t quite work correctly. So for about $16, I picked up a bootleg on AliExpress that touted working a RTC! I went for it, and so far, I’ve put over a dozen hours in to my fakey copy of Crystal with absolutely zero hiccups. The NPCs seem a little twitchy, something about how frantically they change direction when stationary makes me think SOMETHING is amiss with the FPGA cores or the cart itself, but overall, this has been a rock-solid experience so far<\/em>. The thing is, Pok\u00e9mon bootlegs are infamous for not saving the player’s data correctly, and are prone to late-stage storage failure that can even go as far as corrupting the ROM itself and bricking the cart, so I can’t yet vouch for the longevity of this particular bootleg. I can definitely say that I am very impressed with it, especially after comparing it to the next game we’re going to look at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
My Pokemon Yellow bootleg is all fucked up. For my copy of Crystal, I took great care to get a bootleg that I had confidence in, and it turned out great. For my copy of Yellow, I said “Eh, fuck it, let’s see how things are on the other side”. My copy of Pokemon Yellow was $6, and it shows. The cartridge itself is poorly-molded and the game is lousy with glitches. It’s extremely funny, and it’s unclear whether or not this cart would run better on a real GBC – I think my next purchase will be a completely unmodified GBC to use as a baseline. The more I learn about these quirks, the more interested I am in circumventing them. And spending money. And owning six different devices to play Game Boy Color games on.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Finally is Pok\u00e9mon Creepy Black, based off of the classic creepypasta and bearing a label that… Doesn’t look like the one in the creepypasta. But the romhack itself is a classic, and I’ve definitely been enjoying it as a Halloween treat. And for $3, you can’t beat it. Most of the goofier bootlegs are this cheap which makes them so easy to recommend. I do want to point something out, though, and this kind of informs what I was saying about the reliability of saves on these bootlegs. When I save my Pok\u00e9mon Crystal bootleg, it saves 100% normally – I truly have not had a single issue with this one. But for Yellow and Creepy Black, saving is accompanied by a distinct hard STOP where the audio cuts out and the game fully freezes as a routine part of the save process. I don’t remember this happening with authentic Gen 1 carts but maybe it does. I worry that this is related to that save issue we discussed earlier – from what I hear, this is a way to cut costs by making these bootlegs “save” without a proper save battery. By retaining the player’s save in the RAM. The issues allegedly arise after the Elite Four, when the player’s save data changes in file size. But I also read that in Gen 1, your save data stays a consistent size throughout the game and the endgame change only occurs in Gen 2, and my Gen 2 cartridge saves very smoothly and has a fully-functional RTC. I’m fuzzy on the details here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which saves will survive? Who knows! But hey, for now I have one very good Pok\u00e9mon game and two that are total jokes – that should keep me busy while I save up for some authentic carts, which will be the next thing I’ll be buying after I find a good deal on an unmodified original GBC. I’ll likely put a better speaker in and get a worm light, but I think I might leave it at that. Maybe after I’ll go for an Analogue Pocket and start collecting GBA or get another GBC to fully mod out – I hear that aftermarket OLED display looks really good. And I’m definitely going to buy a million shitty bootlegs so I can make a big post about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, thanks for reading my infodump! I’ve been working on new music and brainstorming game ideas, so if you haven’t already, go back to the homepage and click my links! The Discord’s been popping off and the streams have been getting a lot more interesting (if a little less regular, more on that later). Peace out goon squad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alright so as outlined in my previous blog post, I made exactly two purchases to begin my decorated war campaign as a Game Boy cartridge collector. I say to myself “I can collect LIMITED physical media” so I picked CDs and Game Boy cartridges. Fine choices. So I made exactly two purchases. As you can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","category-hardware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155,"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decaynet.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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