Making a Game Boy cartridge using a Raspberry Pi RP2040
Sebastian Quilitz has designed and built a Nintendo Game Boy cartridge with the hardware based on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller.
The RP2040 has 8 PIO state-machines which are like small co-processors which can run arbitrary code. They are designed to be efficient in IO operations. Which is what they are mostly doing in this cartridge. They follow the Gameboy cartridge parallel bus interface and detect if the cartridge needs to spit out or receive some data. Those requests are forwarded to the ARM core through the FIFOs. There a cascade of DMAs will happily handle those requests. To put this in the correct view: The RP2040 has 12 DMA channels and 8 PIO state-machine. The code in this repository uses all of those.
The code is on GitHub under a GNU General Public License v3.0. The PCB design files are here.
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