Game boy colorizer homepage code#

Additionally it allowed for games to share battery-backed SRAM and was more efficient in dealing with games of different sizes. Its main feature was that the menu could protect any bits of the MMM01's bankswitching registers from the games contained within the cartridge. This chip allowed the programmer to address as much memory as the later MCB5 chip (8MB). The second method was to use the MMM01 chip. Bomber Man Selection was released in Korea and is a GBC-only release. Mortal Kombat & Mortal Kombat II, the only multi-cart game released outside of Asia, does not support SGB. Six games used the MCB1M method to select multiple games : Bomber Man Collection, Bomber Man Selection, Genjin Collection, Momotarou Collection, Mortal Kombat & Mortal Kombat II and Super Chinese Land 1.2.3'. This unique method of using the MCB1 has been referred to as MCB1M. A menu program to select the games can be fit into a spare bank. Each game, which has no reason to write to the RAM bankswitching register, will think it is playing on its standalone cartridge. By repurposing the RAM bankswitching registers to control ROM bankswitching on the cartridge, support for multiple non-battery backed games became possible. MCB1 has registers to control ROM bankswitching and registers to control RAM bankswitching. The first was to use the standard MBC1 in a non-standard way. Others did not and had to use multi-cart friendly hardware instead.

Game boy colorizer homepage code#

Some developers revised their code to change their pointers. When it was combined with other games, its memory pointers may no longer work because the game is no longer where it thinks it is. When the game was originally developed, it assumed it would be the only game on the cartridge. While some of these Collections used standard MBCs, some did not. Many of these collection releases had some Super Game Boy support.

These games had been previously released as single cartridges at an earlier time, but publishers sought to squeeze some more money out of them by re-releasing them with other games to persuade value-minded consumers to buy them. Beginning in the mid-90s, some companies began to release 'Collections' cartridges featuring more than one game. The Game Boy was the dominant handheld gaming platform for an incredible nine years (1989-98). MBC3 and MBC5 allowed for even larger games but were introduced around the time of the GBC. Two MBCs, MBC1 and to a lesser extent MBC2, were found in virtually all GB cartridges larger than 32KB.

They also allowed the cartridge to map in battery-backed RAM and to bankswitch RAM. Even when the first games were being developed Nintendo realized that 32KB was insufficient for complex games and devised Multi-Bank Controllers (MBCs) to allow the GB to address much more ROM using bankswitching. Other memory locations were reserved for communicating with RAM, APU and PPU, the Link Port and reading the buttons. The GB's 8-bit CPU can only address 64KB of memory, and Nintendo designed the chip so it could address 32KB of ROM. Let's shift gears for a moment and discuss GB memory mapping hardware. By embracing the past the developers of the GB port made a perfectly acceptable use of more than four colors on the SGB's active display. Later versions of Space Invaders had circuitry to generate color, but only for rows of graphics, not by tile or character. Color cellophane strips were put over the monitors to give color to areas of the screen. Early versions of space invaders used black and white monitors. But Space Invaders takes advantage of how the original arcade hardware worked. Normally developers avoided using more than four colors in the active playing area to avoid issues where the color of a tile depends on its location on the screen. Finally the SGB version also supports more than four colors in the active play area in either the Color (5 colors) or Cellophane Color (8 colors) modes. The GB version also supports positional stereo sound whereby the sounds of your shots are louder out of your left or right speaker if your cannon is on the left or right side of the screen. It contains the SNES version of the game which it loads into the SNES's W-RAM if you select that option. Space Invaders is a remarkable cartridge in more ways that I originally realized. Additionally, Nintendo changed palettes every level, which also helps to break up the monochromatic approach. The status bar's use of different colors, which is possible because the status bar is always in a fixed position, helps distract from the fact that the colors below it can be achieved with the SGB's palette editor. Below the status bar, the active portion of the screen is only using four colors for each level of Donkey Kong.

When we enter the game, things take on a much more monochromatic cast.