It's been a while since I last posted here. Having two

children, the months before Christmas often become very

busy, and I also had some busy weeks at work. So nothing is

better than a few days off. We spend a couple of days at our

cabin and came back home on friday. Today, we drove back to

the cabin again to celebrate New Years Day far off from

civilization. That is, not further away then to have a

lousy, but still quite stable internet connection.

Last year, I bought an old Nintendo Gameboy, the DMG-01.

Partly, because I never owned one back in the 90s. My

parents didn't want me to spend my spare time with playing

games, so no C64, no Gameboy, no consoles. As a result I

learned BASIC, and later Pascal and Assembly on CP/M, and

started writing my own games on an Amstrad CPC 464 when I

was 8 years old. Kind of an early stard for my career as a

programmer. The other reason for buying a Gameboy was my 10

year old son's interest in retro gaming. Right after I

bought the device, the Gameboy celebrated its 30th

anniversary, resulting in rised prices for games.

Here are the games I bought in 2019:

Tetris

Donkey Kong

Wario Land 3

Lemmings

Mario & Yoshi

Dr. Franken

And on a combined cartrige:

Alley way

Bomber Boy

Tennis

Bust a Move 2

Ninja Turtle 2

Dr. Mario

Over the past days, I ordered more games on Ebay and Finn.no

(The Norwegian answer to craigslist). Some of them are still

on its way:

F1 Race

Killer Instinct

WWF Superstars

The Hunt for Red October

Ms Pacman

Pinball: Revenge of the Gator

Kung Fu Master

The Gameboy's battery life is exceptional compared to todays

mobile phones and playing devices. But my son complains

about the display without backlight. It seems to be the

Gameboy's biggest advantage (more battery life) and dis-

advantage (almost impossible to see with bad lighting). So

my plan is to buy another DMG-01 and modify the display with

a backlight. I haven't ordered the parts yet, but it does

not seem to be difficult. With two Gameboys, we also can

play together with a link cable (DMG-04).

My son also has an old NES (the European PAL model). That's

where things went wrong this Christmas. I ordered some more

NES games on Ebay:

Mission Impossible

California Games

1942

But, sadly, I did not check the region for these games. It

turned out these where NTSC-cartidges, hence the price (PAL

games are usually much more expensive). But, internet to the

rescue: I found a page that describes how to bypass the

region check on a PAL NES [1]. It requires only two wires to

be soldered to the NES, so the mod is reversible. I have not

yet modified the NES, but this will be one of my first

projects of 2020. It's always good to have a plan.

Nevertheless, we had a great time playing these old games

this Christmas! I'm looking forward to play more games in

2020. Happy New Year to everybody on Gopherspace!

[1] https://aaltomies.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/pal-nes-region-free-mod-without-tampering-with-cic-chip-leg/

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