GameBoy as external HDD

[si-skyline]

HAHA sweet. god i have tons of gameboys laying about.. would never thought of putting a hard drive into one tho,

great idea, cant wait to see the finished product

[FrooP]

this idea is awesome, poorly I throw my gameboy in the bin you could make the original start button as the power switch, would also be a killer idea
keep it up und grüße aus brühl^^

[doesi87]

this idea is awesome, poorly I throw my gameboy in the bin you could make the original start button as the power switch, would also be a killer idea
keep it up und grüße aus brühl^^

Grüße zurück nach Brühl^^. I want to use the original on/off switch as a power button for the HDD.

I soldered it out of the board and connected the two pins which represent the same pole.
Test inside the case.

After gluing the backplate back into place i removed the flip thing to open it. But it looked really bad from the rear so i decided to make something simulating this flip thing. I cut out a small piece of the white battery case plastic and fitted it to the gap. Then i cut the top part of the flip thing and glued it to the little piece of plastic. After that both parts are being glued to the case.

You know this really big gap between the top and bottom part of the case, where the game is inserted? I decided to create a nice vent in that place. So i searched for old games and found these two ones. I wanted one with Mario, because it was the first game i ever played with a gameboy. I also found Super Mario Land 2 but i will go with part one, if i do so.

Don't sure which one i will pick. Super Mario would be nice, because it's a classic. But i don't want to destroy the cartridge. And you won't see much of the cartridge at all.

I will just open the Dr. Mario game to see whats inside and how i can make a nice vent out of it.

[Spawn-Inc]

I will solder some cables to the marked points and connect them to a test switch to be sure it will work. There is just one problem. The remote uses one on and one off switch for each channel. But i want to have an on/off switch. Not sure how to make that, but it is still time to solve that little problem.

from my own experience if you have the butten pressed constantly (which you will with a switch, and assuming you leave the switch on) then it will drain the battery. this happened to me twice with my tv remote. i jammed it (not hard) in between my bed and wall and within 4 days it was dead. it took 2 sets of batteies for me to figure why it was doing that.

[doesi87]

from my own experience if you have the butten pressed constantly (which you will with a switch, and assuming you leave the switch on) then it will drain the battery. this happened to me twice with my tv remote. i jammed it (not hard) in between my bed and wall and within 4 days it was dead. it took 2 sets of batteies for me to figure why it was doing that.

Yeah, that would have been a problem. But i hope to get the original A and B buttons to work as the on and off buttons. If it works it will avoid this problem and look really nice.

I opened the game cartridge to check if it will work. To my mind it will, so now i have to decide which type of vent i want. I might just go with holes. Will plan that later this evening or tomorrow.

Before telling you about the other work I've done i must tell you a little story. I owned this cheap kind of a Dremel for 30 €. It was a bit annoying to use but it worked. But when i tried to work on the case of the gameboy today something weired and frightening happened. The bit decided to leave the locking mechanism while working and drilled about 2 mm deep into the working bench. This frightened me a bit, so i decided to go and by a real Dremel ( wanted to have one for about 2 years). I got this nice little toy here

On the left is my old one which is in the bin now.

So with being well equipped for now i started working on the case again. I removed the unnecessary plastic to fit the HDD.

Hopefully the HDD and the external case will arrive tomorrow so i can start planing where to put everything.

[NocturnaL]

Nice man, old school idea here +rep

[doesi87]

The HDD and the external case arrived today. So i started fitting it into the gameboy. Sadly i can't keep the original on/off switch because it won't fit.

I made a hole for the slot and fitted it.

After that i made a piece of plexi to attach the board and HDD at a straight level. The plexi was then glued in place.

After that i made a little piece of plexi to secure the board in its place. The piece is screwed to the bigger plexi with the weired screws from the gameboy case. They fit m2 holes, so i could screw them into the plexi.

Then i wanted to make the vent in the gameboy bigger, because they were really small. But i made something totally wrong in this part. So i had to remove the complete vent section. I glued some plexi to it. It does not look this great but i will slope the edges to make it look a lot better. Maybe i can illuminate it with power from the status led. Have to see how it will look if two leds are connected to it.

To board has a status led with two colors. It is blue in idle mode and red when there is HDD activity. Like this LED so i will keep it. It will be placed where the battery led is in an original gameboy. I parted the LED from the board and soldered wires to it, so i can move into the right place. I will glue it into place when most of the mod is finished.

The HDD has a one button backup function which is nice because it will work as a backup disk. Not sure about the software but i want to keep the functionality. So i decided to move the backup button to the original start button. (Nice idea from FrooP) I prepared the start button with wires and tested it. Worked nice.

There's just one little problem about it. I have no idea on how to remove the button from the board. Hope you can help me with that. So here some pics:

I'm a little bit afraid of damaging the whole thing, especially after destroying the remote. So please give me some advice on how to get this thing of.

[scar~face]

SUUUUUUUUUUH-WEEEEEEET

i want one.

[doesi87]

I removed the plexi I added to the vents and used some mesh from the external enclosure. It does not look that nice but I'll go with it, because it's way better than the plexi. So here are some pics about the process:
The mesh:

Making a plexi pattern for bending the mesh into shape:

Mesh from both sides:

I will flatten the edges around the mesh later today to make it look a lot better.
Also I covered the original speaker hole with some of the mesh. I will continue this with the other holes in the case I don't need anymore. Hope they'll give a little ventilation, so disk won't become to hot. Look on the last picture to see the hole. It's right in the middle.

Since I won't be able to use the original screws to mount the case back together, I decided to make a support form this plastic to screw the case together. Can't really explain this in English, so I will post some pics when I did it.

[DaveW]

Argh! It was all going so well! The mesh needs a bit of work dude. It's a real shame because this was looking absolutely great up till that point.

I think if you took the mesh out and made the hole bigger, it would make it much easier to work with and you could get it to sit better. Plus, the way you can still see 'bits' of the original speaker grill sort of ruins the effect.

Don't take it the wrong way, you do what you like-but constructive criticism is what you're here for, right? :p

-Dave