The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy

The Game Boy was designed to be a cheap, low powered, portable gaming system.

Nintendo knew that size and weight were the most important factors for a system to be portable.

Nintendo engineers came up with ingenious ways to create games that have not only stood the test of time, but launched some of the most valuable franchises in the entertainment industry.

Sharp developed a new type of LCD screen known as Super Twisted Pneumatics .

These extra twists made a sharper transition between on and off possible.

This technology resulted in sharper black and white pixels, with the green color of the Gameboy being a byproduct of the polarizing filters tint.

The 8 bit CPU could only handle 64 kilobytes of memory less than a single frame.

Programming a game like Super Mario Land required some creative problem solving.

The Game Boy came with only one speaker that was controlled by only four channels, 2 square wave tone generators, 1 white noisemaker and a separate channel that could load any custom waveform that is stored in the game cartridge.

Nintendo gave programmers the choice to pause the line scanning mid frame to adjust the positioning of the viewing window.