Gameboy: Everything under the hood.

Stronger than you think.

I don’t like consumerism. One of my favorite Scholars, Bertrand Russell, once said

“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”

But you can bet I have a soft spot in my heart for Nintendo products. Pokemon on Game Boy Advance was one the only games I have ever truly enjoyed before being dragged by the dark, drab realities of life. I’d love to have a shelf with Pokemon merch, but I digress.

Now that we are done with that segment, let’s get started by looking at the beautiful, beautiful Game Boy Classic!

The Game Boy is as old as me, and it has more processing power than me. It has an 8-bit processor called the SHARP LR35902, which is a “hybrid” between Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80. Z80 is considered an enhancement of the 8080. Z80 had an enhanced instruction set that had single-bit addressing, shifts/rotates on memory and registers other than accumulator. You had program looping, program counter relative jumps, block I/O and byte search instructions. Z80 also had new IX and IY index registers and a better interrupt system. SHARP LR3590 had a little bit of both.

• 8080’s registers are used (Single Register file)
• Z80’s Coding Syntax and Instruction Extender was used.
• However, neither IX, IY nor 8080’s I/O scheme were used. SHARP used a completely memory scheme, so these were not needed.