Arduinoboy Completion.

I recently completed an arduinoboy(which can be found at http://code.google.com/p/arduinoboy/), after a fair bit of messing around trying to make it work.
As it turns out, the main problems were the following;
1. I had a few of the pins on the gameboy cable wrong.
2. In an attempt to make it work I'd put the optocoupler in backwards(rendering it dead it appears.)
3. When these things were fixed, I'd neglected to notice my midi connector was upside down, so the leads to that were backwards.

I fixed all these and have since been playing around with it, mostly as a MIDI clock for LSDJ, although it does have a keyboard mode, and a full midi mode of MGB, which I will play with later.

For now though, I have been using this ability to sync my gameboy with cut up breakbeats running in Puredata, so that I could add not only a new group of sounds to my music, but a new level of performativity with the function of a controller I built for PureData.

The controller(left), a Gameboy(center), the Arduinoboy(far right), and my midi interface(top)

Here is a screenshot of the patch.

Which you can download here.


I made THIS song using the gameboy, connected to the patch using the arduinoboy.

Reflection - Hardware

Why have I chosen the hardware i have?

I chose to use Nintendo gameboy and an apple SE/30 as my main tools for this project, firstly for their ease of availability to me,having already owned both for some time I didn't need to seek out other tools to use for the production of my music. The gameboy in particular already has a large foothold in the chipmusic community due to its ease of availability, low cost replacement and the availability of software written for it. Software on this platform also has the possibility of being “flashed” to carts, a process where the software is written to the cart, allowing easy updates, backing up of saved files, and the ability to change to a different software if the composer wishes.
The SE/30 on the other hand, functions mostly on proprietary software from now non-existent companies and manufacturers. Although in recent years much of this software has been made available in public domain through sites such as the internet archive (http://www.archive.org)

The community surrounding gameboy use is yet another reason why I chose to use it, with many ongoing “open”projects, such as the arduinoboy, pushpin device, pushpin software and MGB(midigameboy) software. The first two devices listed allow external control over the gameboy, and the two pieces of software work in conjunction with them(arduinoboy may be used as a clock source or note control with lsdj, clock source for nanoloop, or have full midi control over MGB).

The SE/30 on the otherhand has only a small community, most of which have no relation to the chipmusic scene, or even music in general. Through my production of music using this piece of hardware, I hope to raise awareness of the platform and assist in the furthering of its use as a musical tool.