Drop-In Replacement Board Brings the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance SP

Spekham2013's third-revision upgrade PCB swaps the Raspberry Pi Zero out for a more powerful module, but the battery life suffers.

Gareth Halfacree
3 years agoGaming / Retro Tech

Pseudonymous Reddit user "Spekham2013" is working on a drop-in replacement motherboard for old Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP hand-held consoles — one which houses a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 for a serious performance upgrade.

"This is my take on a drop in replacement for a Game Boy Advance SP," Spekham2013 writes. "This is the third revision of the PCB. The first two consisted of a Raspberry Pi Zero, but with the release of the Raspberry Pi CM4 I needed to try this one. There is also a second PCB [...] to connect a ILI9341 LCD to easily connect it to the PCB using an FFC cable. The concept works great with the exception an undersized capacitor on the output of the 5 volt boost converter."

The carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, which gives the Game Boy Advance SP an upgrade from a 16.78MHz ARM7TDMI processor with 256kB of external DRAM to a 1.5GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A72 boasting up to 8GB of LPDDR4, has a range of features including a dedicated DAC with amplifier for the original speaker, an STM32L0 microcontroller to handle button inputs and battery management via an STC3100 fuel gauge chip, and an HDMI output for big-screen gaming.

"There is though one major flaw in my eyes," Spekham2013 admits: "The battery capacity. This is in my opinion the reason the project shall never succeed. There [is] hardly any space for a battery. I’m having struggles fitting in a measly 1250mAh battery, with an average consumption around 400-600 mA this is kind of a sh***y battery. It was a great concept but fundamentally wont ever work good."

More details on the project can be found on Spekham2013's Reddit thread.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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