I found out about a few mods I could do for the Super GameBoy, which is the cartridge released for Nintendo’s Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES, or “Super NES”) back in the early 90’s that allowed you to play your Game Boy cartridges on your TV. I thought this was great since I did have an old DMG unit at the time that I would buy the occasional game for here and there, and I was especially excited that they were releasing an updated version of Donkey Kong specially made for it that would have some enhanced features when playing it on the SGB. This was back when retro gaming and updating the classics wasn’t seen as very viable.
While I don’t mess around with Game Boy games all that often anymore, I’m always open to pissing around and modifying something just to do it. In the case of the SGB, I had found out that the first version of it (and the only version we got of it in the USA) actually ran slightly faster than the original GameBoy, and there was a mod available for the SGB to correct this. The original SGB also excluded the link port and capability of connecting it up with another unit. Not that I ever had the need to link 2 Game Boy systems together, let alone with the SGB, but finding out that I could add this functionality made me want to do it.
I added the “clock fix” mod over a year ago and didn’t take any pictures of that process at the time, so here is a picture of the link port mod that also shows the clock fix board that I had to add, circled:
The 2 main components of the link port mod are shown below:
Here is the finished product, and a harsh reminder that I urgently need to get some jewelry files or whatever and stop relying solely on a Dremel tool to hack plastic in my projects:
And finally, here is a screenshot of the SGB link in action, connected to a Game Boy Color unit (with the sweet, sweet OLED screen that I added), playing the only cartridge I have that supports link functionality (*sigh*), Zoop.