There’s no shortage of cloned Nintendo hardware out there, and most of it is pretty poor. A few are actually pretty interesting though, such as the GB Boy by Gangfeng, which takes real cartridges and thus in many ways should provide the original Game Boy Pocket experience with modern hardware. But as you might imagine, even the best of the clones comes with various technical issues at no additional charge — with this particular unit having a habit of running the game too fast. It’s an issue that [Sharopolis] addresses in a recent video with a partial fix.
As can be seen in the demonstration, it runs games just too fast to make it very usable or fun, hence why it sat in a drawer for a few years after purchasing off AliExpress. This raises the question of what’s wrong with these units, as others report similar issues with this and other ‘GB Boy’ variants.
Fortunately the unit is easy to open, revealing the PCB with a couple of chips on it, one marked KF2001 being the brains of the operation alongside two memory chips. The oscillator marked X1 for the main IC is rated for 5 MHz, whereas a quick look inside the Game Boy Pocket shows that its oscillator runs at 4.1943 MHz, which is a bit of a difference.
Because of how buying components and pricing works, [Sharopolis] ended up with a reel of 100 of replacement oscillators with the right parameters for a drop-in replacement. After swapping the oscillator, the GB Boy now does indeed run games at the right speed, but a new issue has now cropped up in the form of flicker on the display.
In the comments it’s suggested that replacing the cheap capacitors on the GB Boy’s board can help here, but it highlights just how these clone systems keep managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by pairing what looks to be a pretty good IC with either the wrong or sub-par components.
Source: Blog – Hackaday