ENGAGE VS gameboy

Could be, take a look at the batteryless Gameboy for example: https://github.com/TUDSSL/ENGAGE

But I don't know how to design at all, and RAM on its own is a lot harder to integrate into a board, and isn't as simple as soldering 8MB PSRAM on a Teensy pad. That said, this academic group did that with An Apollo3 MCU: https://github.com/tudssl/engage The Apollo4 will have 1.8MB SRAM, which I think will be more than a lot of these boards have https://ambiq.com/apollo4/ at much lower power. The Apollo3 Blue+ has 768K SRAM.

Thanks for the analysis! I am not an engineer so I try to glean as much as I can from this so hopefully I can find the right components and discard the things that aren't needed. This board here used the same MCU in my link above: https://github.com/tudssl/engage so I am looking for ways to turn it into a solarpowered laptop with e-ink that doesn't shutoff/sleep every 10 seconds but can idle 24hrs using a few of these https://www.powerfilmsolar.com/products/electronic-component-solar-panels/indoor-light-series/ll200-2-4-75. I had considered the ESP-32WROVER with 8MB RAM but the PSRAM is not as low power as FRAM.

I became curious because this project ran a game on a 48mhz processor using FRAM: https://github.com/tudssl/engage

Looks like they used an existing emulator and this was mostly a hardware and memory integrity test. I’d love to see this approached from the perspective of “how clever can we get with the emulator itself to save power?”

When I wrote mine, something I ran into was realizing that often the CPU and PPU are just doing the same thing over and over and over. If only I could cache all that work.

For example, you don’t modify the previous frame. You have to draw the entire frame every time, writing sprites from OAM memory every time. Sometimes games do clever stuff here for effects, but a lot of the time you’re just drawing the same stuff. Like Tetris is almost completely a routine of drawing almost entirely the same graphics every time. Most of the cycles and OAM writes are just juggling sprites to draw the same layout every time.

I documented the heck out of the PPU because it gave me the second most grief (sound being the worst by far) if you are curious: https://github.com/ablakey/gameboy/blob/master/src/guest/sys...

As long as you're not doing any complex argument handling, it's dead simple:

https://github.com/ablakey/gameboy/blob/master/src/main.rs#L...