Playing gameboy on a TV so you don't go blind. For demo / test/ kiosk use. Imagine super gameboy for snes with no borders and quad scanned.
These are basically the last revision of Famicom Wideboys, without the (optional) on-board Game Boy but this time with the Famicom on-board. They come two units in a package for two Game Boy displays (two separate games or two GBs linked for competitive play). The thing that's cooler about these than normal Wideboys is that they have an awesome screen boarder. I remember first playing lots of games on these kiosks at toy stores; Donkey Kong Land actually was playable on it. It works by tapping a few signals for the GB's LCD screen and audio. The audio is just amplified to a speaker (TV), but the video is a little bit more complicated. LCD video is digital so the Demovision receives pixels (and a pixel clock with sync signals), which it assembles in logic into tiles and stores in dual port memory which also acts as tile memory for the Famicom. The Famicom has a program running on it to update the screen along with the GB and little else. I think the CHR ROM (tile ROM) for the Famicom contains the border I talked about, this is also the reason why the Demovision has a MMC5 "mapper" chip, it's likely used for it's ability to interrupt the Famicom split screen. So the Famicom would display the border for n pixels then bankswitch to the dual port RAM, then bankswitch back to the border.
Sorry if this sounds noobish, but what is "quad scanned?" Anyway, the Demo Vision is pretty cool, but I still prefer the Wideboy (and SGB) since the colour scheme can be changed on each. here are some additional pictures: http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/demovision.html http://www.disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/wideboy.html
I was trying to describe in as simple terms as possible what it was like, drawing analogy as if it each line of resolution was quadrupled. I guess I failed.
But nothing is doubled or quadrupled, is it? These things run off NES hardware, whose resolution is 256x240 (roughly). The 160x144 Gameboy image is placed smack-dab in the centre of this, with the appropriate borders on all sides to take up the rest of the screen space: Unless the system whose PCB you scanned outputs a wildly different type of display?
As I said, I was trying to create a comparison without being pictures, Sort of like saying an elephant is as big as a house. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words. That aside, I have boxes for GBC and GBA I can open and take pics of if you'd like to have a look at the insides.
personally I'd love to see the insides of more of these. When you have time Kev, throw some more board scans up. I found this one to be interesting, actually made me go look up more info on the unit
