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I helped my dad install a new dumb thermostat last winter. We just had to drill a couple of new holes to mount it, and moved the wires over. Boom,there was heat again. I thought about how much of a pain in the ass it was to get my Ecobee working, and how refreshing it was to just have something work immediately.

It’s a very similar feeling to playing my GameBoy Color again after messing around with retro gaming linux handhelds. You just turn it on and play, then just turn it off. No boot sequences, no emulator settings to tweak. No SD card corruption that ruins your game library. Just on and off.

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uuldika@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

No boot sequences

(being annoyingly pedantic) technically there is a boot sequence: the Gameboy logo. on the DMG there’s a little blob of code from 0x0000 to 0x00ff that clears some memory, sets up the screen, reads the logo from cartridge memory and scrolls it. the loader only jumps to the game if the logo is byte-identical (the idea being that unlicensed games could be sued for trademark infringement.)

on the GBC the loader is a little beefier but mostly the same.

t. made a horribly broken FPGA core for the GBC that got just far enough to load the Tetris intro

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- BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yes, but that’s pretty miniscule compared to booting any of the linux based retro handhelds. An Bernice, Powkiddy, R36S, they all have like a 30-40 second boot time.
  
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  - fishy@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Just booted my R36S. 21 seconds to be on the title screen of a game, Gameboy is apx 4 seconds. I was just curious so I thought I’d share.
    
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drgeppo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
it’s the reason why the original Odroid Go it’s so special to me… it’s all built around an ESP32 microcontroller and it does emulate only NES, GB, GBC and a couple more, while honestly not even being perfect at it, but goddamn… it boots in like 1 second, even directly to the last game you were playing, it has no settings whatsoever, the battery lasts for like 7 hours it’s such a neat little device.

and it’s funny because in my head that it’s the device that kickstarted this whole retro handheld emulation craze, but it is the only one to take such a minimalistic approach

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racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It’s not comparable. Nintendo must have spent millions on developing the Game Boy, meanwhile retro handheld is a hobby project someone did over the quarter. Ever try to port and run an RTOS on those ARM chips? And port a mainstream Game Boy emulator to it? “What do you mean you have to have MMU support?Just work, damnit?”

It doesn’t work like that.

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- BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  It’s completely comparable in this circumstance. They are performing similar functions, playing handheld games. My R36S is a pretty impressive little device, and it performs excellently at playing games. But using it is much more complicated and longer than popping a game in a gameboy.
  
  Gameboy: insert game, turn on, play, turn off. R36S: turn on, 30-40 second boot time, locate game, play, exit emulator, shut down, 10 second shutdown time.
  
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  - racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Sir, I sincerely think you missed the point. Somebody, that nobody who only knows just enough programming, spent three months (at most) in his basement, putting together a embedded Linux and integrated emulators in a portable computer, cannot be compared with a video game company’s officially released commercial product. The money, the time, the effort, the equipment, the testing, not one is in the same magnitude.
    
    Sponsor a group of enthusiasts who have the right skill to live for a year, they can replicate Game Boy with modern hardware too, 100% identical or even better. Consumers like us who only paid $20 for the retro handheld emulator? We don’t have a right to complain about the performance and quality.
    
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