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.
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.