How do you know if your original Game Boy is working to the best of its ability? It's creeping closer to 40 years old, it can't tell you it's got a dodgy wire, and it's been a workhorse for its entire life. If you're into repairing and restoring Game Boys, then GB Test Lab might just revolutionise your life.
This test cartridge checks the health of a Game Boy, right down to dodgy link ports and potential faults with wiring, deeper problems than just 'my game won't load'. It's been created by Marcel Pflug of the Game Boy Museum (thanks, Hackaday), and can be put onto any Everdrive cartridge to slot into your Game Boy. Here's the list of system requirements as listed by Game Boy Museum:
- A classic Game Boy. It is built for the DMG-01 and its baseline figures are DMG-01 figures (not intended for Pocket, Color, or Game Boy Advance or any later models).
- A flash cartridge that handles MBC5 and 256 kilobytes. This is the one that catches people out: a cheap cartridge emulating only MBC1 or MBC3, or stopping at 32 kilobytes, gives a black screen and nothing else. An EverDrive runs it
- A battery in that cartridge, if the records are to survive being switched off
- Fresh alkaline cells. A flash cartridge draws considerably more than a game, and tired cells make a Game Boy fail in ways that look exactly like faults in the machine
- For the cable screen: a second Game Boy, a link cable and a second copy of the cartridge
- For the report on paper: a Game Boy Printer and thermal paper
If you know your Game Boy history, then you'll know all about the fact that Nintendo have their own kind of cartridge that does a similar thing called DMG-AGING-01. It doesn't mean 'man, that DMG is old!', but rather testing something under load for a period of time to see how things run.
GB Test Lab checks every component of your Game Boy as though you had plonked it down in front of an Accupuncturist for the first time. As I said above, everything from the Link Cable orts to key bounce time gets tested, giving you readouts of every component and allowing you to monitor everything from CPU and RAM to if the DMG connects to the GB Printer efficiently.
Head to Game Boy Museum to download the ROM file and get testing out your consoles. You can also take a deep dive into the science behind the project if you want to impress your friends at parties.
