I was wondering if I could use the display from my now dead Gameboy DMG-01 with my arduino uno? I found this: Diving deep into the Game Boy LCD protocol and thought it might be cool to retrofit my gameboy with an arduino board.
This article Gives a lot more useful info. Still not quite enough for it to be a done deal. I daresay it would be fairly easy(ish) to get working. But would be taking quite a deal of the arduino's time just keeping the display up to date. Since there are so few signal lines, I think it would be an ideal project for an ATTiny to control. Then this could interface to another arduino that can just update the display, as and when it wants to.
Even so, for the effort and end result, you'd be better off just buying an LCD. (but no so much fun)
4 shades of gray and the resolution is only 160×144
That means you need 5.625k of RAM to hold the image you are going to display. That rules out a lot of arduinos including the ATTiny.
The Mega has 8K so that is a fit.
However the pixel clock is 4MHz so on a 16MHz machine there is no way you are going to feed data out at that rate, given you have to retrieve it from a byte and output it to two pins.
So that puts you in the class of the Arduino Due / teensey. It could be done with this but it is not 5V and so you need signal level converters.
However if you have to ask this question I suspect your skill set is not up to doing this yourself and you are looking for some one elses code / hardware to copy.
Grumpy_Mike:
4 shades of gray and the resolution is only 160×144
That means you need 5.625k of RAM to hold the image you are going to display. That rules out a lot of arduinos including the ATTiny.
5760 bytes! I hadn't done the maths. Soon adds up eh? Looking less attractive by the minute.
As for the clock rate, I wonder just how critical that is. Since it's effectively a synchronous transfer, with all timing signals being provided by the host. It would be interesting to see how it responds to a much more leisurely transfer rate. After all the screen itself is probably a fairly passive device. It looks like just a glorified arrangement of shift registers to me.
Still, the rewards are not high enough to make it a worthwhile project.
As for the clock rate, I wonder just how critical that is.
It is very critical as it defines the refresh rate of the LCD. You slow that down and the display will start to flicker.