I recently got my music bug again, and with my recent trip to Australia was able to bring back my original Gameboy. Combining the two, I thought I’d check out what music-making capabilities the Gameboy had. The most popular software was “Little sound DJ” (https://www.littlesounddj.com/). I purchased the full version of that, and while I could run that on an emulator, I wanted to run it on the real deal. To do this, I purchased a Gameboy flashing cartridge, “Flash BOY” ( https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/223590080458). This came with few instructions however. I was able to plug it into my laptop’s USB and see that it displayed as a FTDI device, but would need drivers. I installed some from here: https://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm but after more googling for flashing software, found that this also provided some drivers: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gbcf/
Starting up that tool, I put the flash boy cartridge into the flash boy itself and was greeted with this:
TMNT3? I put the cartridge in my gameboy just to check and – yep! There was TMNT3! I guess they used it as a test ROM.
Anyway, that was soon replaced with the LittleDJ software. I first hit “Erase FLASH” and then “Write FLASH” which gave me a file choice dialog box, where I chose the little sound DJ .gb file. It took a few minutes to flash. I put the cartridge in and was greeted by the text “”CARTRIDGE TEST SRAM FAIL TRY CLEANING PINS OR REPLACE BATTERY”.
I didn’t really know how to fix this, so I reset my FLASH size to be 2048 KB (16 Mb, which is what the Flash BOY supported), and upped the RAM to 32 KB. I did a full erase FLASH and RAM, then reflashed the DJ file, and read back the results:
Success! (Previously I was getting a bad game logo signature and a “Flash chip manufacturer name” of “Xilinx”).
…. or was it? Although this now wrote to the cartridge correctly, the ROM was not that of the DJ software. Looks like I will be needing a part 2 to this post!