Personal website of Evan Barger, Boston area software developer and electronics hobbyist.
For a while now, I’ve wanted to try designing my own Game Boy cartridge circuit board. However, instead of making a standard cartridge designed for games, I wanted to make a cartridge to experiment with a hidden feature of the Game Boy line - an audio input! Though it was never used by official licensed games, the original Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, and Game Boy Color, all support audio input on…
Flash carts are a popular aftermarket accessory for Game Boys. A flash cart allows you to store and play many different games from the same cartridge! One of the most popular flash cart brands is EverDrive , who make flash carts for many different retro game systems. I myself own the EverDrive X5 for the Game Boy Advance, and the Everdrive X3 for the original Game Boy. Both devices are fantastic,…
It has been over three years since I released my first commercial game to the iOS App Store, Endless Archery . Endless Archery is a simple physics game where you shoot arrows at a target over procedurally generated terrain. It’s meant to be a relaxing experience, in addition to having soft achievements and a leaderboard to reward players going for high scores. The game started life as a small…
For whatever reason, my 2020 has been all about modding Game Boys and PSPs. I’ve worked on quite a few projects in this area (see GBNP and Consolized PSP ), but here I want to showcase a few of the smaller mods I’ve created that maybe don’t need a full post dedicated to them :) Saving Brightness Levels on a GBA SP While the stock Game Boy Advance SP has two brightness levels (or on/off depending…
Last weekend I participated in Ludum Dare 46 competition, an online game jam held 2 times a year, in which the goal is to build a game solo in 48 hours. Each event has a theme that that your game is supposed to adhere to. For Ludum Dare 46, that theme was “keep it alive”. I strayed from my usual game jam strategy this time around, opting to use Love2D instead of Pico-8 . On top of Love2D, I built…
In 2000, Nintendo released the Nintendo Power Game Boy Cartridge (AKA GB Memory cart), a first party re-programmable flash cart. You were able to take this cartridge into stores, insert it into a kiosk, and download new games to it. This was done to make more space in stores for Nintendo 64 games. Until now, the only way to flash these cartridges with new games was to use a relatively decent open…
Recently, when I was clearing out some things from my parent’s house, I came across my old Sony PSP . I have a lot of fond memories playing games like Patapon 2, Wipeout, and Metal Gear Solid on the thing, so I thought it would be fun to revisit some of those games. Problem is, I’d rather play them on a TV! While the PSP 2000 I have supports video out, there is no way to use a real controller, so…
Last weekend I participated in Ludum Dare 44. Ludum Dare is an online game jam held 3 times a year, in which the goal is to build a game solo in 48 hours. Each event has a theme that that your game is supposed to adhere to. For Ludum Dare 44, that theme was “your life is currency”. The game I build is called NEXCIDIUM . It is a basic vertical shooter, where you play a drug traveling through a…
One month ago, I released my first iOS game, Endless Archery ! The game is an expanded version of my Pico-8 version of the game . The game is fairly simple at its core. You shoot arrows over procedurally-generated terrain, trying to hit a small target area. Once you hit the target, the game scrolls to reveal more terrain, and your next target. This was a complete rewrite of my original Pico-8…
Endless Archery is an arcade game I wrote for the Pico-8 fantasy console. Check it out on itch.io ! The game is simple - fire arrows at targets, on randomly generated terrain. Hit the target, and the terrain scrolls the reveal the next one. I made use of the same midpoint-displacement algorithm I learned working on my javascript terrain generator demo . Pico-8 constrains the programming…