Once upon a time, in a small and quiet village, a boy fell asleep and dreamed a terrible dream. This is the story of Deadeus, a homebrew horror game built for the original Game Boy and released on real cartridges by Incube8 Games. It is a dark fairy tale told in four shades of grey, the kind the Brothers Grimm might have whispered around a dying fire, and it plays by rules entirely its own. Here there is no princess to save and no dragon to slay, only a village, a clock, and a very difficult question. A homebrew horror where the Game Boy remembers how to be frightening. The Characters Our hero is a young boy, ordinary in every possible way but one: in his sleep he has been shown the future, and it is a future of ashes. The vast and looming presence over the entire tale is Deadeus itself, a god or entity said to dwell at the bottom of a deep pit beneath the village, patient and enormous and not in the slightest bit kind. It is less a monster to be fought than a fate to be reckoned with. Around the boy lives a whole village of ordinary souls whose lives now hang in the balance because of his dream. There is a girl he cares for, the folk who keep the little coffee shop, a village doctor, a strange prisoner who does nothing all day but count under his breath, and, moving through the shadows, a secretive cult called the Sons of Deadeus. They worship the thing in the pit as a god, and they have kept it fed with sacrifices, children among them, once every fifteen years. It is a small village with a great many buried secrets. The World The whole of the story unfolds within one small village and its surrounding dark, rendered in the plain, flickering black and white of a handheld first sold in 1989. It is a deliberately humble little stage, a cluster of houses, a shop, a well, a pit, and that very smallness is what makes the horror seeping through it feel so uncomfortably close. Everyone knows everyone here, which means everyone has something to hide. Time itself is the cruel engine that drives the whole tale forward. The boy has exactly three in-game days before the prophecy of his dream is due to come true, and the clock does not slow or stop for anyone, least of all for him. Every hour he spends knocking on doors and digging up secrets is an hour that can never be spent again, and the village's promised doom draws steadily, silently nearer with every single choice he makes. The Adventure The dream is blunt and merciless in its warning: in three days a god will rise and destroy the village, and every last person the boy knows and loves will die with it. Waking in a cold sweat, he sets out at once to learn whether such a nightmare can somehow be stopped, or whether, in truth, it can be stopped at all. The Brothers Grimm would have approved. And been slightly disturbed. There is no single golden path laid out neatly for him to follow. Instead he wanders from house to house and from person to person, asking questions, prying into corners, digging up the ugly and secret things his neighbours would far rather keep buried forever. Some doors will open only at certain hours of certain days; some fleeting chances, once missed, are gone for good and cannot be won back. Every action the boy takes bends his story quietly down a different road, and the game trusts the player, unnervingly, to decide for themselves what a good ending would even look like. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends There is no single ending to Deadeus, and that unsettling fact is the whole dreadful point of it. The game is documented as having eleven different endings in all, and no two players need ever reach the same one. Some are quiet, some are shockingly violent, and almost none of them are what you could honestly call comfortable. In the proper spirit of a true and cruel fairy tale, here are just a few of the paths that players have recorded, told only in the broadest of strokes so as to spoil nothing precisely. In one, the boy simply chooses to leave, turning his back and walking away from the village to save himself and abandon all the rest to their fate. In another, gentler and far more sorrowful, he sits down beside the girl he loves to watch the end of the world arrive together, the two of them making a quiet peace with the fact that nothing at all can be done. In a stranger, almost holy ending, he casts himself down into the pit as a willing sacrifice, and the entity below, moved despite itself by such selfless courage, chooses to spare humankind for the moment and remakes the boy as the new Deadeus. Darker roads wind through the village too. There is a grim path in which the boy turns on his own neighbours, and one especially bleak ending set in the coffee shop that finishes in poison and quiet death. There is even a haunting finale in which, having become the very last soul left alive, he wanders on forever repeating a single number under his breath, thirty-seven, exactly as a certain mad prisoner once did before him. So which of all these is the true ending? Deadeus flatly refuses to say. It simply hands you the three days, the frightened village and the terrible choice, and then leaves the moral of the whole story entirely in your own trembling hands. Homebrew tales like this one prove that the humble Game Boy still has brand new stories left to whisper in the dark. Explore more of them over at the Game Boy Museum, where the little grey machine keeps on finding fresh and surprising ways to unsettle and delight us. The Full Series Great Game Stories · No. 1: The Alien Who Wanted a Queen (Super Mario Land) · No. 2: The Day Wario Stole the Castle (Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins) · No. 3: The Scoundrel Who Wanted a Castle (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3) · No. 4: The Hero Who Could Not Die (Wario Land 2) · No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong) · No. 6: The Wager of Cranky Kong (Donkey Kong Land) · No. 7: A Trainer's Journey Across Kanto (Pokemon) · No. 8: The Boy, the Blob and the Tower (The Rescue of Princess Blobette) · No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars) · No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair) · No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly) · No. 12: Three Days Until the End of the World (Deadeus) · No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening) · No. 14: The King Who Stole the Feast (Kirby's Dream Land)

Once upon a time, a young hero was lost at sea. A storm smashed his little boat to splinters, and when the waves had finished with him he washed up, half-drowned, on the shore of an island he had never meant to find. This is the strangest and most tender tale the little grey cartridge ever told, and it begins not with a quest but with a boy waking in a stranger's house, a long way from home. There is no Princess Zelda to rescue here, and no kingdom of Hyrule to save. This adventure belongs to the island alone, and to a secret so gentle and so sad that players have been turning it over, fondly, for more than thirty years. So settle in, because this is really a story about waking up. The dream of Koholint, boxed in gold: the Dutch edition of Link's Awakening The Characters Our hero is Link, washed up on the sand with his sword lost to the surf, and the little grey cartridge that carries him is labelled The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. He is the brave, silent adventurer you know, but here he is a castaway with no kingdom behind him and no memory of how he came to be here, only a strange compulsion to find a way back to the sea. The girl who finds him on the beach is Marin, and she is the heart of the whole tale. She looks a little like Princess Zelda, but she is entirely her own person: warm, funny, forever singing, and quietly aching to leave the small island she has always known and see the wider world. Her father is Tarin, a kindly, bumbling man with a thick moustache and a weakness for mushrooms, whose round face is a gentle wink at a certain plumber. And at the centre of everything sleeps the Wind Fish, an enormous whale-like being curled inside a giant egg on the island's highest peak, dreaming. The back of the box, where Koholint is described in Dutch and glimpsed in two small screenshots. Against them stand the Nightmares, shifting shadow-creatures who want one thing above all: for the Wind Fish never to wake, and for the dream to go on forever. The World The island is called Koholint, and it is a whole little world folded into a single cartridge: the cosy houses of Mabe Village, the sweep of Toronbo Shores, the tangle of the Mysterious Forest, the swamps and the high, windswept Tal Tal Mountains. It is dotted with faces that have wandered in from other games, hopping Goombas, a rattling Chain Chomp, even a frog prince, all of them reframed as the furniture of a dream. To leave the island, Link is told, he must wake the Wind Fish, and to do that he must gather the eight Instruments of the Sirens, hidden deep in eight dungeons, and play them together. The Adventure A helpful owl appears at the turning points of the journey, nudging Link onward from dungeon to dungeon, each one guarded by a Nightmare and holding one of the eight instruments. Between the dungeons the island simply lives around him: there is a long chain of trades to untangle, telephone booths manned by a helpful walrus of a man, a beach where Marin walks with Link and sings, and a hundred small kindnesses and jokes that make Koholint feel like somewhere real and worth saving. A complete Dutch copy: box, cartridge, tray and manuals, seen from every angle. And that is exactly where the sadness creeps in. The deeper Link goes, the more the island itself seems to whisper the truth. The owl grows cryptic, the monsters taunt him, and a slow, dawning unease settles over the adventure: this beautiful place may not be real at all, and waking the Wind Fish may cost more than Link ever meant to pay. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends With all eight instruments gathered, Link climbs to the top of Mt. Tamaranch and plays the Ballad of the Wind Fish before the great egg. It cracks open, and inside waits the last and worst of the Nightmares, a shape-shifting shadow that becomes monster after monster before Link finally strikes it down. The cartridge that holds the whole dream, beside its clear case. Then the Wind Fish tells him the truth. Koholint Island is a dream, the Wind Fish's own dream, and everyone on it, Marin most of all, exists only for as long as that dream lasts. To wake is to make the whole island, and everyone he has come to love, simply vanish. Link plays the final notes anyway, because it is the only way home. The island dissolves, and he wakes adrift on the open sea, clinging to a piece of driftwood under a clear sky, with the Wind Fish wheeling overhead and Koholint gone as if it had never been. Players who finish without ever falling are given one last gift: a glimpse of a seagull rising into the sky, and the quiet suggestion that Marin, who always longed to fly, got her wish after all. It is the most bittersweet ending the Game Boy ever offered. If you would like to meet the cartridge that holds this dream, you can find Link's Awakening in the collection. Come and see it at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Great Game Stories · No. 1: The Alien Who Wanted a Queen (Super Mario Land) · No. 2: The Day Wario Stole the Castle (Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins) · No. 3: The Scoundrel Who Wanted a Castle (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3) · No. 4: The Hero Who Could Not Die (Wario Land 2) · No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong) · No. 6: The Wager of Cranky Kong (Donkey Kong Land) · No. 7: A Trainer's Journey Across Kanto (Pokemon) · No. 8: The Boy, the Blob and the Tower (The Rescue of Princess Blobette) · No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars) · No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair) · No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly) · No. 12: Three Days Until the End of the World (Deadeus) · No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening) · No. 14: The King Who Stole the Feast (Kirby's Dream Land)

Once upon a time, on the smallest of screens, a plumber went somewhere no plumber had gone before. Not to the Mushroom Kingdom, and not to rescue Princess Peach, but to a stranger, sun-baked corner of the world that most travellers had never even heard of. This is the tale the little grey cartridge tells, and it begins with a shadow falling across a peaceful land. This was the very first Mario adventure you could carry in your pocket, and its fairy tale is dreamier and odder than anything playing on the big television back home. So gather close, and let us begin where every good story does: with a hero, a villain, and a kingdom in trouble. An alien wanted a queen. He got a plumber in an airplane instead. The Characters Our hero is Mario, and the little grey cartridge that carries him is labelled Super Mario Land. He is the same cheerful, coin-loving, ever-jumping fellow you already know, but here he is a stranger far from home, with no brother at his side and no familiar hills to run through. Everything around him is new, and so is the danger. The one he has come to save is Princess Daisy, the bright and gentle ruler of a realm called Sarasaland. This was Daisy's very first appearance in any story, a brand new princess stepping onto the stage for the first time, and she spends this tale waiting bravely for rescue while a most unwelcome suitor makes his plans. That suitor is Tatanga, and he is no ordinary villain. He is a mysterious creature from outer space, a spaceman with strange powers who came drifting down from the stars with conquest on his mind. Tatanga cast a spell of hypnosis over the people of Sarasaland, turning gentle creatures into obstacles, and he decided that he would make Princess Daisy his queen whether she wished it or not. The World Sarasaland is not one country but four, and each of its kingdoms feels like a different daydream. Mario must cross all four to reach Daisy, and no two of them look alike. First comes the Birabuto Kingdom, a land of hot sand, ancient pyramids and watchful stone sphinxes. Then the Muda Kingdom, a warm and rolling sea where much of the journey happens beneath the waves. After that rises the Easton Kingdom, a windswept country of enormous carved stone heads standing silent on the plains. And last of all waits the Chai Kingdom, a misty, far-eastern realm of pagodas and drifting clouds, closest of all to the sky where the alien's warship hides. The Adventure Mario's road runs through twelve stages, three in each kingdom, thick with coins to gather and blocks to bump. His most delightful trick here is the Superball. Touch the right flower and Mario's throw becomes a bouncing little star that ricochets off floors and walls, striking foes and scooping up coins as it caroms about. It is a small magic, but it makes the whole journey sparkle. At the end of each kingdom stands a guardian, and the first is King Totomesu, a fire-breathing sphinx with the body of a lion who blocks the way out of Birabuto's great pyramid. Here Mario learns a clever secret that repeats across the land: behind each guardian is a switch, and a brave plumber who leaps clean over the monster and slaps that switch can drop the beast away and open the door without ever winning a fair fight. In the Muda Kingdom the adventure dives underwater, and Mario climbs into a tiny submarine called the Marine Pop to putter through the deep, firing at the fish and creatures who bar his way. At the bottom waits Dragonzamasu, a strange armoured seahorse who guards the exit with a spiky little helper at his side. Dragonzamasu - Ruler of the Muda Kingdom The Easton Kingdom is a place of stone, and its guardian is the mightiest sight yet: Hiyoihoi, a towering creature of living rock who hurls great boulders, the Ganchans, down the path to crush anyone foolish enough to approach. Mario must dodge, dart and keep his nerve among the falling stones. At last comes the Chai Kingdom, all pagodas and pale cloud, where the final guardian is Biokinton, a grinning face riding a cloud who flings birds at Mario as he runs. Beat Biokinton, and only the open sky remains between Mario and the alien who started all this trouble. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends For the final chapter, Mario leaves the ground behind entirely. He climbs into the Sky Pop, a plucky little airplane, and soars up into the skies above Chai to meet Tatanga face to face. The alien fights back from his warship, and the two trade fire across the clouds while Mario weaves between the shots, patient and stubborn. When at last Tatanga's ship is battered from the sky, the spell over Sarasaland shatters. The four kingdoms wake as if from a bad dream, the hypnotised creatures come to their senses, and there stands Princess Daisy, free at last. She greets her rescuer, the clouds part, and the smallest Mario adventure ends with the whole of Sarasaland safe and at peace. Not bad for a story you could fit in one hand. If you would like to meet the very cartridge that first carried Mario into your pocket, you can find Super Mario Land waiting quietly in the collection. Come and see it at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Great Game Stories · No. 1: The Alien Who Wanted a Queen (Super Mario Land) · No. 2: The Day Wario Stole the Castle (Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins) · No. 3: The Scoundrel Who Wanted a Castle (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3) · No. 4: The Hero Who Could Not Die (Wario Land 2) · No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong) · No. 6: The Wager of Cranky Kong (Donkey Kong Land) · No. 7: A Trainer's Journey Across Kanto (Pokemon) · No. 8: The Boy, the Blob and the Tower (The Rescue of Princess Blobette) · No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars) · No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair) · No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly) · No. 12: Three Days Until the End of the World (Deadeus) · No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening) · No. 14: The King Who Stole the Feast (Kirby's Dream Land)

Once upon a time, a hero came home from a long and heroic journey, tired and proud, only to find that a stranger had moved into his house. Not just any house: his castle. And not just any stranger, but a big, greedy, purple-and-yellow fellow with a moustache almost as grand as Mario's own. This is the tale of the day Mario had to win back his very own front door. Six golden coins: the world's most inconvenient front-door key. It is a story about coming home, about a rival nobody had ever met before, and about six shining coins scattered to the far corners of a very odd little land. Settle in, because this is where one of gaming's greatest scoundrels first swaggered onto the stage. The Characters Our hero, once again, is Mario, and the cartridge that tells his story is Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. Mario returns from his travels expecting a warm welcome and a quiet nap, and instead finds his own home locked against him and his own people turned into strangers. The villain, and the true breakout star of the tale, is Wario. This was his very first appearance anywhere, and what an entrance it is. Wario is Mario's greedy rival, a big, grasping fellow who has been jealous of Mario since they were small, and who wants nothing so much as a grand castle to call his own. While Mario was off being a hero, Wario simply took Mario's castle for himself. Worse still, Wario cast an evil spell over the good folk of the island, brainwashing them so that they would serve him and turn against their old friend Mario. To keep the castle safe, he handed six golden coins to six fearsome guardians and hid them across the land. Without those coins, the castle door will not open, and so the whole adventure is set. The World This time the whole tale unfolds on Mario's own island, a land entirely his own, with his beloved castle standing at its very heart. Spread around that castle are six strange and marvellous zones, each one its own little world, and Mario is free to wander into them in almost any order he chooses. There is the Tree Zone, an enormous tree crawling with giant insects. There is the Macro Zone, a house so gigantic that Mario shrinks to the size of a mouse among its everyday clutter. There is the Pumpkin Zone, a haunted jack-o-lantern of graveyards and ghostly houses. There is the Mario Zone, a colossal mechanical statue built in Mario's own likeness, humming with gears. There is the Turtle Zone, a watery world tucked inside a giant tortoise. And high above them all floats the Space Zone, out among the moon and the stars where gravity turns feather-light. Wario's villain debut: a whole game just to answer his own front door. The Adventure Mario's task is simple to say and hard to do: gather all six golden coins, one held by the boss of each zone, and only then can he unlock the castle. Along the way he finds old friends and new tricks. The fire flower is here as always, and a brand new charm too: the Carrot, which sprouts a pair of rabbit ears on Mario's cap so he can flap them and glide gently down through the air. In the Tree Zone he must climb past swarms of bugs to face the Big Bird who guards the branches. In the Macro Zone, tiny and vulnerable, he faces a giant rat far larger than himself. In the Pumpkin Zone he braves the ghosts and their mistress, a cackling Witch. And in the Mario Zone, deep inside the great clockwork statue, he must outwit the Three Little Pigs waiting at the machine's heart. In the watery Turtle Zone, an octopus lurks hidden inside a whale, and Mario must swim it down to claim his coin. And in the far Space Zone, drifting among the stars, he meets an old foe: Tatanga, the very alien who once tried to marry Princess Daisy, now working as a hired guardian for Wario. Defeat him, and the sixth and final coin is Mario's at last. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends With all six golden coins gathered, the great locked door of the castle finally swings open. Mario climbs up through his own twisted halls, now dark and full of Wario's guards, all the way to the top, where the greedy newcomer himself is waiting with a grin. Wario does not go quietly. He fights in one puffed-up form after another, growing larger, snatching Mario's own power-ups and turning fiery and quick, but Mario keeps his head and wears the bully down. At last Wario shrinks to a tiny, sulking little figure and scurries away in defeat. The spell over the island snaps, the good folk wake as if from a dream, and the castle is Mario's once more. As for Wario, he slinks off nursing his bruised pride and dreaming of a castle of his own, which, as it happens, becomes a story all his own. If you would like to see the little cartridge that first introduced the world to Wario, you can find Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins resting in the collection. Come and visit it at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Great Game Stories · No. 1: The Alien Who Wanted a Queen (Super Mario Land) · No. 2: The Day Wario Stole the Castle (Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins) · No. 3: The Scoundrel Who Wanted a Castle (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3) · No. 4: The Hero Who Could Not Die (Wario Land 2) · No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong) · No. 6: The Wager of Cranky Kong (Donkey Kong Land) · No. 7: A Trainer's Journey Across Kanto (Pokemon) · No. 8: The Boy, the Blob and the Tower (The Rescue of Princess Blobette) · No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars) · No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair) · No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly) · No. 12: Three Days Until the End of the World (Deadeus) · No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening) · No. 14: The King Who Stole the Feast (Kirby's Dream Land)

Once upon a time, the villain got to be the hero. Not a nice hero, mind you. A loud, greedy, garlic-loving brute of a hero who wanted only one thing in all the wide world: enough treasure to build a castle even grander than Mario's. This is the story of how Wario stopped stealing other people's spotlight and swaggered off into an adventure entirely his own. It is a tale of pirates, of a skull-shaped island, of silly magic hats and, best of all, an ending that grows or shrinks depending on just how greedy our hero is willing to be. Fair warning: nobody in this story is especially well behaved, and that is exactly what makes it fun. The villain gets his own game, and immediately robs a pirate. The Characters Our anti-hero is Wario, and the cartridge that finally lets him lead is Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. Fresh from being thrown out of Mario's castle, Wario wants a palace of his own, and he is not fussy about how he pays for it. The prize that catches his eye is a rumour: a band of pirates has stolen a giant golden statue of Princess Toadstool and is holding it for a princely ransom. Mario is out searching for it too, but Wario reasons that if he grabs the statue first, along with all the pirates' other loot, he can cash it in and buy a palace far bigger than his rival's pathetic little castle. Greed, for once, is the whole plot. Standing in his way is Captain Syrup, the clever and dangerous queen of the Brown Sugar pirates. She rules the island, she commands the crew, and she guards a hoard of stolen treasure that she has no intention of handing over to a garlic-scented thief in a purple cap. The World The whole adventure takes place on Kitchen Island, a strange, skull-shaped scrap of land that the Brown Sugar pirates call home. It is dotted with hiding places, and Wario must fight his way clear across it, one region at a time. He starts on the sunny shore of Rice Beach, then climbs the slopes of Mt. Teapot. There is the frozen, secret Sherbet Land, an icy detour you can only reach by sniffing out a hidden way in. There is the fiery Stove Canyon, the pirate vessel of the SS Tea Cup, and the gloomy tangles of Parsley Woods. And at journey's end looms Syrup Castle itself, the stronghold where the pirate queen waits with her treasure and her temper. The Adventure Wario does not play the game the way Mario would. He is too heavy and far too rude to daintily bounce on his foes. Instead he lowers his shoulder and barges straight through them with a mighty shoulder-bash, or grabs them and hurls them aside. And everywhere he goes he is hunting: for coins, for the fat money bags that fill his sacks, and above all for the fifteen glittering treasures hidden across the island. Scattered through the land are magic Power Up Pots, and each one hands Wario a new hat and a new power. As Bull Wario he wears a horned helmet, pounds the ground with a mighty stamp and even clings to the ceiling above him. As Jet Wario he sprouts a little jet pack and goes zooming through the air. And as Dragon Wario he dons a spout of a helmet and breathes gouts of fire down onto his enemies. One greedy man, three ridiculous costumes, endless mischief. Collect everything and Wario gets a planet. Collect nothing and he gets a birdhouse. The clever part is that treasure hides behind secrets. Many a coin and many a jewel is tucked away behind a hidden door or a blocked passage, and it is those secret exits that unlock the optional icy world of Sherbet Land. A lazy Wario can simply bash his way to the finish. A truly greedy Wario turns over every stone on the island, and, as we shall see, that greed pays off in the strangest way. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends At last Wario storms into Syrup Castle and corners Captain Syrup herself. She is not about to lose gracefully. She rubs a magic lamp, and out roars a great Genie. The pirate queen hops up onto its shoulders and the pair go swooping around the room, flinging fireballs at the intruder. But Wario is stubborn as a mule, and eventually he pounds the Genie down. Beaten but never truly caught, Captain Syrup escapes by blowing up her own castle and slipping away into the smoke. Wario, though, walks off with the loot, and here comes the most delicious twist in the whole tale. What Wario gets to build with his fortune depends entirely on how much of it he managed to carry home. Gather only a little and the poor scoundrel ends up with a tiny birdhouse. Gather more and it grows into a hollow tree trunk, then a cosy log cabin, then a handsome pagoda, then, at last, a proper castle to rival Mario's. And for the very greediest treasure-hunter of all, the one who tracks down every single one of the fifteen treasures and sweeps up every coin on Kitchen Island, the reward is grander than any castle: Wario gets a whole planet of his own to lord over. In this story, the size of your happy ending is measured out exactly by the size of your greed. If you would like to meet the cartridge that turned gaming's greatest grump into a leading man, you can find Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 in the collection. Come and see it at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Great Game Stories · No. 1: The Alien Who Wanted a Queen (Super Mario Land) · No. 2: The Day Wario Stole the Castle (Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins) · No. 3: The Scoundrel Who Wanted a Castle (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3) · No. 4: The Hero Who Could Not Die (Wario Land 2) · No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong) · No. 6: The Wager of Cranky Kong (Donkey Kong Land) · No. 7: A Trainer's Journey Across Kanto (Pokemon) · No. 8: The Boy, the Blob and the Tower (The Rescue of Princess Blobette) · No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars) · No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair) · No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly) · No. 12: Three Days Until the End of the World (Deadeus) · No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening) · No. 14: The King Who Stole the Feast (Kirby's Dream Land)

Once upon a time, there was a hero who simply refused to die. Squash him flat, set him alight, or turn him into a shuffling zombie, and he would only grumble, shake it off, and keep marching toward his treasure. This is the tale of Wario Land 2, the adventure where losing was made impossible and getting even became the whole point. No lives, no game over: the only truly deathless hero on the Game Boy. It is a story that begins, of all things, with a flooded castle and a stolen chicken, and it ends not once but many times over, depending entirely on which secret doors our greedy hero decides to open. Come and see how a game turned a plumber's old rival into the most unkillable treasure-hunter on the little grey machine. The Characters Our hero, if we may still call him that, is Wario, and the cartridge that carries him is Wario Land 2. By now Wario has his own castle and a fine hoard of treasure, and there is nothing he loves more than a good long nap on top of a pile of gold. That nap, as it turns out, is exactly the problem. Returning to trouble him are Captain Syrup and her band of pirates, back for revenge after their earlier defeat and just as cunning as ever. They have not forgotten the greedy man who once raided their island, and they mean to teach him a lesson while he sleeps. The trouble begins with a marvellously petty crime. While Wario snores away, the pirates creep into his castle and help themselves to his treasure. They even make off with his beloved pet hen. For good measure they set off his enormous alarm clock to jolt him awake at the worst possible moment, and they leave the taps running so that half the castle is flooding as he opens his eyes. Wario wakes up soaked, robbed and absolutely furious, and off he stomps to get everything back. The World The adventure begins right at home, in Wario's own castle with the water still rising, and then spills outward into a long chain of chapters. Wario chases the fleeing pirates through caves and forests, across strange machines and eerie haunts, deeper and deeper into their world as he tries to catch them and reclaim what is his. The pirates flooded his castle and stole his hen. Big mistake. What makes this land so unusual is that it is not a single fixed road. The chapters branch. Tucked away in many stages are hidden exits, and each one sends Wario down a different path to a different place. Two players can set out from the very same flooded castle and end up wandering completely different corners of the story. The map, in a sense, is different for everyone. The Adventure Here is the great twist that makes Wario Land 2 so different from almost every game around it: Wario cannot die. There are no spare lives to lose and no game over waiting for a careless step. The very worst that an enemy can do is change his shape for a little while, or knock a few of his precious coins loose to go rolling across the floor. Better still, those changes are not punishments at all. They are the keys to the puzzles. Get squashed flat by a weight and Wario becomes a pancake who can flutter down and slip through the narrowest of gaps. Get set on fire and he charges about in a blazing panic, burning through ropes and obstacles that would otherwise stop him. Get stung and puffed up like a balloon and he floats gently upward to places his stubby legs could never reach. He can even be turned into a zombie who sinks straight down through certain floors. Every misfortune is really a tool in disguise. Japanese Game Guide - Cheeky as Wario Because Wario can never be beaten, the whole spirit of the adventure shifts from surviving to searching. Instead of fearing enemies, he uses them. Instead of counting lives, he counts coins and hunts for hidden treasure. And because those secret exits keep branching the road, a curious, greedy Wario is rewarded with more paths, more riches and more of the story to uncover. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends Because the roads keep forking, this tale does not have one tidy ending. It has many. Depending on which hidden doors Wario chooses to open and which paths he follows, he arrives at different conclusions, some quick and some winding, each with its own final scene and its own secret treasures to be found only along that particular route. Yet whichever road he takes, the heart of the ending is always the same. Wario chases down the pirates, gets the better of them, and stomps home with his stolen fortune recovered and his flooded, ransacked castle set right again. To see every last one of the endings, though, a player must go back and walk the roads not taken, which is exactly the sort of thing a treasure-hound like Wario would want you to do. If you would like to meet the cartridge that made its hero utterly impossible to defeat, you can find Wario Land 2 in the collection. Come and see it at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Great Game Stories · No. 1: The Alien Who Wanted a Queen (Super Mario Land) · No. 2: The Day Wario Stole the Castle (Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins) · No. 3: The Scoundrel Who Wanted a Castle (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3) · No. 4: The Hero Who Could Not Die (Wario Land 2) · No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong) · No. 6: The Wager of Cranky Kong (Donkey Kong Land) · No. 7: A Trainer's Journey Across Kanto (Pokemon) · No. 8: The Boy, the Blob and the Tower (The Rescue of Princess Blobette) · No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars) · No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair) · No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly) · No. 12: Three Days Until the End of the World (Deadeus) · No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening) · No. 14: The King Who Stole the Feast (Kirby's Dream Land)

The Characters Every good fairy tale needs a hero who is smaller than his troubles, and this one gives us Mario. In 1994, long before he was the plump plumber of a thousand kingdoms, he was simply a stubborn little man in a red cap who could jump, climb and, above all, never give up. Beside him stands the whole reason he runs at all: Pauline, a bright and kind-hearted young woman who has the great misfortune of being very easy to admire. One hundred and one rooms, one very determined moustache. That admirer is Donkey Kong, the great ape of the title. He is not truly wicked, only lonely, jealous and far too strong for his own good. When he decides he wants Pauline all to himself, he simply scoops her up and climbs away, and the entire adventure comes tumbling out behind him like a spilled basket of fruit. Keep an eye out, too, for a small shadow near the very end of the tale: a tiny ape with an enormous heart, who reminds everyone that even a monster can be somebody’s family. The World This story unfolds across nine wondrous lands, and the clever little Game Boy tucks every one of them into the palm of your hand. It begins, as the oldest legends always do, on a construction site of red girders, tall ladders and rolling barrels. But once the chase truly begins, the world opens up like a picture book: a bustling Big City of rooftops and elevators, a shadowy Forest, a rocking Ship out at sea, a steaming Jungle, a blazing Desert, a great Airplane high in the clouds, a glittering Iceberg and a Rocky Valley of cliffs and caverns. Each of these lands is stitched together from dozens of tiny single-screen rooms, more than a hundred of them in all, and every little room is its own clever riddle. Nothing is wasted. A ladder here, a locked door there, a single switch that changes everything: the whole kingdom is really one enormous puzzle box, patiently waiting to be solved one screen at a time. Donkey Kong: 900 pounds of misunderstood loneliness and excellent barrel-throwing form. The Adventure The tale opens with a scene every grandparent will recognise. Donkey Kong stands at the top of a tower of girders, Pauline waits helplessly above him, and barrels come thundering down like an angry storm. Mario climbs, he leaps, he dodges, and after four familiar stages he reaches the summit and takes his lady’s hand. The victory music swells. The story seems, for one lovely moment, to be over. And then comes the cheekiest twist the Game Boy ever pulled. Donkey Kong simply wakes up, snatches Pauline all over again, and bounds clean off the screen. The real adventure has barely begun. What follows is not the old barrel-dodging game at all, but something new and marvellous: ninety-seven more stages, each a tiny puzzle in its own right. In every room a key waits somewhere behind gaps, spikes, ladders and switches, and a matching locked door waits patiently on the far side. Mario must carry that heavy key across the room without dropping it into a pit or a puddle. To manage it, our little hero learns a whole circus of new tricks. He can stand on his hands and walk upside down, spring high off a nimble backflip to reach impossible ledges, balance objects on his head, stack crates and platforms into staircases, ride moving lifts and flip switches that raise ladders and lower bridges out of thin air. And at the end of each of the nine lands, Donkey Kong himself is waiting for a proper showdown, hurling barrels and fruit until Mario, with perfect timing, sends him scrambling off to the next land with Pauline tucked under one great arm. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends The chase ends exactly where it was always going to end: at the very top of the world, on the roof of a towering city building, with nowhere left to climb. Cornered at last, Donkey Kong does the only thing a cornered giant can think to do. He grows. He swells into an enormous, mountainous version of himself and throws everything he has at the tiny plumber below. But Mario has not crossed nine lands to stumble on the final rooftop. With well-judged jumps and well-aimed barrels he wears the giant down, and at last the great ape topples and shrinks back to his ordinary size. And here the fairy tale shows its soft heart. There is no cage, no punishment, no cruel revenge. Mario offers Donkey Kong a hand, Pauline is safe and sound, and the two old rivals part as something much closer to friends. The lonely ape learns that a lady cannot simply be carried off and kept, and the little hero learns that even the biggest brute deserves a hand back up. And so, with a wave and a grin, the longest chase on the Game Boy comes gently to rest. Would you like to hold this pocket-sized legend for yourself? Step into the Game Boy Museum and wander the full catalogue of cartridges, curiosities and stories that we lovingly preserve. The Full Series Great Game Stories · No. 1: The Alien Who Wanted a Queen (Super Mario Land) · No. 2: The Day Wario Stole the Castle (Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins) · No. 3: The Scoundrel Who Wanted a Castle (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3) · No. 4: The Hero Who Could Not Die (Wario Land 2) · No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong) · No. 6: The Wager of Cranky Kong (Donkey Kong Land) · No. 7: A Trainer's Journey Across Kanto (Pokemon) · No. 8: The Boy, the Blob and the Tower (The Rescue of Princess Blobette) · No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars) · No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair) · No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly) · No. 12: Three Days Until the End of the World (Deadeus) · No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening) · No. 14: The King Who Stole the Feast (Kirby's Dream Land)

A few steps from the roar of Roma Termini, in a city whose entire identity is built on art, there is a museum that makes a quietly radical argument with 120 glowing screens: that the video game belongs in that same conversation as the paintings, the marble and the ruins all around it. The GAMM Game Museum is Rome's home for interactive media, and it is one of the more ambitious places of its kind anywhere in Europe. Rome's Game Museum - GAMM From VIGAMUS to GAMM GAMM did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of VIGAMUS, the Video Game Museum of Rome, which opened in 2012 as the first museum in Italy dedicated entirely to video games. That lineage matters. Rome has been taking games seriously as cultural heritage for well over a decade, long before many larger countries got around to it, and GAMM is the next, larger chapter of that effort. The museum is run by Kabuto SRL and carries the kind of credentials that interactive media are still rarely granted: it is recognised as a museum by the Regione Lazio under the national cultural-heritage directives, it has been listed in the regional museum register since 2014, it is entered in the Italian library registry with its own ISIL code, and it is a member of ICOM, the International Council of Museums. In other words, this is not a themed arcade with a ticket desk. It is a recognised cultural institution that happens to be about play. Seven hundred square metres of interactive history The museum occupies around seven hundred square metres across two levels, divided into three thematic macro-areas that carry visitors from the origins of the medium through to its most recent evolutions. The scale is deliberately immersive. More than 120 interactive screens, gaming monitors and totems, together with a high-impact LED wall, surround a collection of genuine, unique pieces, so that the history is something you move through rather than something you read about. Consoles and arcade cabinets are switched on and playable, which is the right instinct for a medium you only truly understand with a controller in your hands. Keeping that much hardware running and that many stations working is its own quiet, unglamorous discipline, familiar to anyone who has ever tried to keep old machines alive. It is also a space built for three audiences at once: families who come to play, enthusiasts who come to look closely, and industry professionals who come to think about where the medium is going. Striking that balance is harder than it sounds, and it is part of what sets a serious museum apart from a nostalgia attraction. Games as a cultural art form What ties the whole place together is a stated conviction that runs against decades of cultural snobbery: that the interactive medium is a form of art and expression in its own right, worth preserving and presenting with the same care given to any other art. There is a particular weight to that argument being made in Rome, a city whose cultural authority is almost total, and a country whose identity is bound up with the history of art more tightly than almost anywhere else. To stand in the Eternal City and insist that the video game sits in the same lineage as the other arts is not a small claim. It is exactly the claim this field has spent years trying to make, and GAMM makes it on home turf for Western art itself. The Game Boy's place in the story A museum whose three areas trace the medium from its origins to its latest forms almost has to pass through the little grey handheld. The Game Boy arrived in 1989 and did something no console before it had managed: it took the screen out of the living room and put it in a pocket, on a train, under the covers at night. Famously bundled in much of the world with Tetris, it turned a Soviet puzzle game into a global phenomenon and became, for a generation, the first screen that was truly theirs alone. It is a textbook example of a machine that won not on raw power but on battery life, price and a library people actually wanted, a lesson the industry has relearned many times since. Its unlit, green-tinted LCD and four shades of grey were technically modest even in 1989, yet the original Game Boy and its Color successor went on to sell in the region of 118 million units worldwide, numbers most of its flashier rivals never came close to. In a museum built around the whole arc of interactive media, that monochrome handheld is not a footnote. It is one of the hinges on which the entire story turns. A kindred spirit in Rome This is a single-machine archive writing about a recognised national-calibre institution in one of the great art cities of the world, and the scales could hardly be more different. But the conviction underneath is identical: that games are culture, that their history is fragile, and that the best way to honour them is to keep them switched on where people can see and play them. Whether it is seven hundred square metres of interactive history beside Termini or a single grey handheld documented object by object here, the work comes down to the same stubborn idea: that this stuff matters, and deserves to be kept with care. If you are in Rome GAMM sits at Via delle Terme di Diocleziano 35/36, moments from Termini station and Piazza della Repubblica, which makes it one of the easiest museum visits in the city to fit into a day. It is open daily, the space is fully accessible, and you can plan a visit or learn more at gammuseum.com. A museum that seats games at the same table as the rest of the arts, and does it in the city that wrote the rulebook for art, is doing exactly the work the rest of us believe in. Part of our guide to the video game museums worth visiting.

The Netherlands has given the medium more than its share of games, and in Zoetermeer it has given them a home. The Nationaal Videogame Museum is a national museum devoted entirely to video games, and like the best of its kind it does not ask you to admire the exhibits from a distance. It asks you to play them. A national home, hands on The museum sets out to tell the whole story of games, not only the famous titles but the social and cultural side: how we played, who we played with, and what that did to us. Much of the collection is switched on and waiting, so visitors move through the history by actually picking up the controllers rather than reading labels. For a medium you only truly understand by doing, that is the right instinct, and keeping that much old hardware running is its own quiet discipline. Treating games as a subject worthy of a national museum, rather than a toy shop with a ticket desk, is a statement in itself: that this is culture, and that it deserves to be kept and understood. The Game Boy's place in it The Game Boy belongs squarely in that story. It is one of the machines that turned games from something you did at a desk or a television into something you carried in a pocket, on a train, under the covers. A museum tracing how play spread into everyday life almost has to pass through the little grey handheld, and seeing it treated as part of a national cultural record, rather than mere nostalgia, is heartening to anyone doing the same at a smaller scale. A kindred spirit This is a single-machine archive writing about a national museum, and the scales are very different. But the conviction is identical: that games are culture, that their history is fragile, and that the best way to keep it is where people can see and play it. Whether it is a nation's worth of games under one roof in Zoetermeer or a single grey handheld documented object by object here, the work is the same. If you are in the Netherlands, it is well worth a visit, and you can learn more at nationaalvideogamemuseum.nl. A country that gives its games a national museum is making exactly the argument the rest of us are trying to make, only louder. Part of our guide to the video game museums worth visiting.

I run a very small and insignificant museum that does not have a building. The Game Boy Museum lives online, which lets me show you an item from every angle and never once let you hold it. That is the one thing a website cannot give you, and it is exactly the thing video game muesums do better than anyone. So I keep an eye out for new ones and check in on the ones I already know, because those are the places where gaming history is not sealed behind glass but switched on, warm and waiting for a go. This is the guide I wish I had when I started, a tour of the ones worth the trip and what each of them does better than the rest. A grey plastic brick means something different the moment you can press the buttons. You can read every specification on this site, but you will never be able to experience how a room full of Game Boys chirping at once feel, or watch a child meet Tetris for the first time. Almost every place below runs on the real hardware rather than an emulator on a flat modern screen, and that is the whole point. I have grouped them by where they are, starting at home. Switzerland, where this museum is based The Game Boy Museum is run from Zurich, and Switzerland turned out to be quietly rich in places that take play seriously. A few walking minutes from my desk, GamePlaza lets you actually play through gaming history rather than read articles about it. Over in Lucerne, Gameorama does the same across the full breadth of the video game history. At the EPFL in Lausanne, the Musee Bolo keeps the wider history of computing and digital culture, the machines the Game Boy grew up alongside. And on Lake Geneva at La Tour-de-Peilz, the Musee Suisse du Jeu is the oldest games museum of its kind in Europe, now with two Game Boys on display. I gathered them into a short tour of their own if you want to build a weekend around them. Germany, the deepest bench No country in Europe has more to show. The Computerspielemuseum in Berlin opened in 1997 as the world's first museum dedicated to games, and it is still the broadest single room you can walk into. In Hannover, HI-SCORE is the country's largest interactive video game museum, which means almost everything on show is there to be played. Karlsruhe has the oldest public arcade exhibition in the land: the volunteer-run RetroGames e.V. has been on free play, no coins needed, since 2002. And in Munich, Videospielkultur e.V. preserves more than eleven thousand games across fifty years of history, and runs Germany's oldest games night to go with them. Austria, where games are treated as culture Vienna makes the argument out in the open. Since 2004, SUBOTRON has been a shop, a stage and a lecture series in the heart of the MuseumsQuartier, the place the German-speaking scene goes to talk seriously about where games came from and where they are headed. It is proof that a game museum does not have to be a warehouse of hardware to matter. Italy, where games meet the art city In Rome, a few steps from Termini station, the GAMM Game Museum makes a bold argument: that the video game is a cultural art form, worthy of the same serious attention as the art the city is built on. Spread over around seven hundred square metres and two levels, with more than 120 interactive screens, playable consoles and arcades and a high-impact LED wall, it traces the medium from its origins to its newest forms. Grown out of VIGAMUS, Italy's first video game museum, it is a recognised cultural institution rather than a themed arcade. There is more on it in our feature here. Finland, which built its own Further north, Finland went a step further and gave its games a national museum of their own. The Finnish Museum of Games opened in 2017 inside the Vapriikki centre in Tampere, born out of a public crowdfunding campaign, and it traces the country's game history from paper and dice to Snake and far beyond. It even staged Memory Limits, a special exhibition of art made for the Game Boy. The Netherlands, a national home for play The Netherlands gave its games a home in Zoetermeer. The Nationaal Videogame Museum is a national museum devoted entirely to video games, and much of the collection is switched on and waiting, so you move through the history by picking up the controllers rather than reading labels. It makes the same argument as the best places on this list: that games are culture worth keeping and understanding. There is more on it in our feature here. It is a separate institution from the similarly named National Videogame Museum in Sheffield, just below, which catches almost everyone out. Across the Channel and the Atlantic Two more are worth the longer journey. In Sheffield, the National Videogame Museum inverts the usual rule: most museums ask you to keep your hands off the exhibits, and this one asks the opposite. And in Rochester, New York, The Strong and its International Center for the History of Electronic Games hold the largest collection of its kind anywhere, the scale a single collector with a shelf can only dream about. One more British stop rewards the detour. Near Cambridge, the Centre for Computing History keeps the whole sweep of computing and gaming switched on and in your hands, from home computers to the consoles that grew out of them, and pairs it with real education work. There is more on it in our feature here. The archives, where preservation gets serious Some of this work happens well away from the public floor. One museum is racing to save entire virtual worlds before their servers switch off for good, which is the one kind of game that disappears completely the moment nobody is looking. And the whole field is held together by EFGAMP, the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects, which the Game Boy Museum is proud to have joined as a supporting member. These are the people making sure the next thirty years still has something left to show. Across the Atlantic, the Video Game History Foundation is saving the paper trail behind the games themselves, the magazines, design documents and photographs that vanish even faster than the cartridges. If you only have time for one, pick the nearest. The point of every place on this list is the same, and it is the point of this whole museum: games are meant to be played, and history is a great deal easier to love when you can hold it in your hands.

Most computer museums are quiet rooms of dead machines behind glass. The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge is the opposite: a hall of old computers and consoles that are plugged in, warmed up and waiting for you to type, click and play. That one decision, to keep the machines alive rather than embalmed, is what makes it one of the best places in Britain to actually understand this history, and it is why a Game Boy archive feels so at home writing about it. A hands-on history of computing The Centre is a registered charity, founded in 2006, and its collection spans the whole story of computing, from room-sized mainframes through the home computer boom to the game consoles that grew out of it. What sets it apart is that so much of it runs. You can sit at a BBC Micro or a ZX Spectrum, pick up a controller, and experience these machines the way their owners did, rather than reading a plaque beside a switched-off box. Keeping decades of hardware working takes constant, unglamorous repair, swapping failed capacitors, coaxing dead disk drives back to life and hunting down parts that have not been manufactured in thirty years. It is exactly that effort that turns a store of old kit into a living museum. The right city for it There is a reason a museum like this belongs in Cambridge. The city is one of the birthplaces of the British home computer. Sinclair Research, which gave the world the ZX80, the ZX81 and the ZX Spectrum, was based here, and so was Acorn Computers, whose BBC Micro taught a generation to program and whose ARM processor architecture now sits inside almost every smartphone on earth. To walk through a hands-on computing museum in Cambridge is to stand a short distance from where a surprising amount of modern computing was actually invented. Teaching, not just keeping The Centre pairs all of this with serious education work: school groups, holiday workshops and coding clubs, using the old machines to show young people where the devices in their pockets came from. There is something powerful about teaching programming on the very computers that first made it a household activity, the BBC Micro among them. A museum that turns its collection into a classroom is doing something this archive has a lot of time for. A console, after all, is not only a thing to look back on, it is a thing to build with and learn from. A processor you can walk around The Centre is also home to one of the most extraordinary teaching objects in computing. The MegaProcessor, built by engineer James Newman over more than four years at a cost of over forty thousand pounds, is a working microprocessor blown up to human scale: a wall of tens of thousands of transistors and around ten thousand LEDs that light up to show the data physically moving through the machine as it runs. Newman donated it to the Centre, where it was switched on in a handover ceremony in November 2016, and it has since earned a Guinness World Record. It makes visible, in flashing light, the thing every chip hides: that a processor is really just switches turning on and off very fast. For anyone who has ever wondered what is actually happening inside a Game Boy, it is the clearest answer you can walk around. The full range of game consoles, lined up side by side A shared conviction This is a single-machine archive writing about a museum that covers the whole history of computing, and the scales are very different. But the belief underneath is the same: that these machines are culture, that their history is fragile, and that the best way to honour them is to keep them switched on. Whether it is a hall of working computers in Cambridge or a single grey handheld documented object by object here, the work comes down to the same stubborn idea that this stuff matters and should still run. The Centre is one of the places I have gathered in a guide to the video game museums worth visiting around the world, if you are planning a wider trip. If you are near Cambridge, it is well worth the trip, and you can learn more or support the charity at computinghistory.org.uk. A museum you are allowed to switch on is a rare and wonderful thing.

GB Test Lab - A Test Cartridge for your DMG-01 Overview Every time a new Game Boy qualifies for the Game Boy Museum, I want to know the same thing: is it actually all right? Switching on is the easy part. What I really want to know is whether the buttons, the memory, the cartridge slot and the link port are all still doing their job, and I would rather find that out without opening the case or playing on it for a whole afternoon to see what goes wrong. What I always missed was a proper read-out, detailed results on the real health of the machine in my hand. So I began to wonder how much of that a Game Boy could actually be made to tell me about itself. This cartridge is where that question led. The GB Test Lab is my answer to how much is technically possible: you slot it into a Game Boy, it runs every check I became aware of while researching this, and then it says plainly what it found, and just as plainly what it cannot see. It is the second cartridge built in-house here. The first was a reference work, a catalogue and a wiki squeezed onto a cartridge in the spirit of the InfoGenius titles of 1991. This one does the opposite of holding information: it interrogates the console it is plugged into and puts hard numbers on the screen. System Requirements A classic Game Boy. It is built for the DMG-01 and its baseline figures are DMG-01 figures (not intended for Pocket, Color, or Game Boy Advance or any later models). A flash cartridge that handles MBC5 and 256 kilobytes. This is the one that catches people out: a cheap cartridge emulating only MBC1 or MBC3, or stopping at 32 kilobytes, gives a black screen and nothing else. An EverDrive runs it A battery in that cartridge, if the records are to survive being switched off Fresh alkaline cells. A flash cartridge draws considerably more than a game, and tired cells make a Game Boy fail in ways that look exactly like faults in the machine For the cable screen: a second Game Boy, a link cable and a second copy of the cartridge For the report on paper: a Game Boy Printer and thermal paper Nintendo had one first The idea is not new, and Nintendo got there first. Its own service departments used a test cartridge whose board is marked DMG-AGING-01, where ageing is repair-shop shorthand for running a machine hard for hours and seeing what gives out. That cartridge checked the screen, the buttons, the speaker, the memory and the sound chip, and it existed for a plain reason: a repair bench needs a clear yes or no, not a hunch. Modern homebrew has followed, and there are several test cartridges available today. Almost all of them share one trait: they show a pattern and let the person decide. A grid, a grey ramp, a tone, a row of button icons that light up. That is the right approach for a screen, and the wrong one for everything else. What a Game Boy test cartridge can and cannot know It is worth being honest about the limits first, because they decide what a cartridge like this can truthfully claim. The DMG-01 has no analogue to digital converter. It cannot read a voltage, so battery condition is invisible to software. The contrast wheel and the volume wheel are analogue too, and neither is wired to anything the processor can see. The speaker, the amplifier and the headphone socket sit behind the last register the software can reach. And the machine cannot see its own picture. Nothing in the hardware reads back what the screen displays, so dead pixels and the vertical lines of a tired ribbon cable will always be a matter for human eyes. Everything else, though, is fair game, and there turns out to be far more of it than the existing test cartridges ever bothered with. One button, four tests, one word A collector holding an unfamiliar Game Boy has one question before all the others: is this machine even worth keeping? The cartridge answers it with a single menu entry. Quick Check runs the memory, the cartridge slot, the interrupts and the system check one after another and boils them down to a single verdict. Those four were chosen because they ask nothing of the person holding the machine. Everything else on the cartridge wants eyes, ears, a second console or a cable. The whole run takes under a minute, and each screen lingers for about a second on the way past, so you can watch it happen rather than wait it out. A press of B between two of them stops it. The verdict comes in three states rather than two. PASSED means all four held up, FAILED means at least one did not, and INCOMPLETE means one of them never ran at all, which is not the same as failing: a test that never answered the question cannot be called a pass. Four tests, one word. The line below the verdict says what the word does not cover. The line under the verdict names what is not in it. A machine that passes here can still have a dead speaker or a scratched screen, and that sentence is worth reading before the cartridge is handed back. A second rule runs through these screens, and it came out of living with the cartridge rather than building it: every test that measures something now shows what it is about to do and waits for a keypress before it begins. This is not mere politeness. Opening the slot, link or interrupt screen used to write a result straight into that machine's record, so simply glancing at a menu entry could quietly rewrite the account of the console you were examining. The waiting screen also has room the running screen does not. Before a test there is no column of results, so each line can say in full what it is for. During the run the same column carries the verdict instead. The measurement that started the project A Game Boy button is really a small rubber pad with a conductive face. Press it and it does not make contact just once. It closes, springs open and closes again within a few thousandths of a second, and that little flurry is contact bounce. It is normal and purely mechanical, but a worn pad bounces for longer, and more often, than a fresh one. And all of that can be counted without ever opening the case. Two numbers per key, per direction. A worn pad shows up as both of them rising. The cartridge reads the key register in a tight loop with interrupts switched off, about every ten microseconds, timed by the hardware counter at 3.8 microseconds a step. When a contact closes, it watches a window of 30 milliseconds and records two things: how many times the contact changed state, and how long it took from the first change to the last. Pressing and releasing are measured separately, because they differ. A clean press gives one edge and 00.00 milliseconds. On a healthy DMG that is often every key, which is why the verdict says no bounce at all rather than merely passed. A tired pad gives three or four edges spread over a millisecond or more. The screen measures whatever is pressed, in any order, as often as the tester likes. An earlier version asked for the eight keys in sequence and moved on after five seconds of silence. That was a mistake: a tester who looks at the machine instead of the screen loses a key and starts again. One record per console A single reading is only a snapshot. The real question is whether a machine is slowly getting worse, and answering that takes more than one reading, and somewhere to keep them. The cartridge therefore holds a record for each console, and gives it a number rather than a name. A Game Boy has no keyboard, and a name field would be a whole screen built for nothing. The first record creates itself, so anyone testing a single console never meets any of this. Numbered rather than named. The star marks the machine being recorded to. Numbers are never reused. Delete the third machine and the next one is still the fourth, because a sticker on a console has to keep pointing at the right record. Each record holds the bounce figures of all eight keys, the verdict of every test, the burn-in result and the model. It survives the power being switched off, and that is what turns a single reading into an ageing curve. There is one thing to watch, and the cartridge says so where it matters. Moving it to another console does not start a new record, because nothing in the hardware says which machine it is plugged into. The main menu therefore names the machine it is recording to, at all times. Memory, and the pattern that matters Work RAM and Video RAM are separate chips on the board of a DMG-01, and they do fail. The cartridge writes five patterns over each area and reads each one back completely before moving on, because a cell that holds its value for only a few microseconds would pass a check made cell by cell. Eight lines over five areas, the addressing and the sprite transfer. Four of the patterns are the obvious ones: all zeros, all ones, and two chequered patterns that catch a bit stuck to its neighbour. The fifth is the useful one. It writes into every cell a value that depends on that cell's address, which is what finds a broken or swapped address line, because the cell then answers with its neighbour's value. A failure names the address and both values, written and returned. That is the difference between a cartridge that says BAD and one that tells a repair which chip to look at, and which bit is stuck. Three more lines were added later, and none of them tests a cell. The echo area is just the work memory turning up again at a second set of addresses, so checking it confirms the addressing rather than the storage. The unusable area carries a number rather than a verdict. What it returns depends on the model and not on the condition, and a DMG answers with zeros. The third line is the sprite transfer, which moves 160 bytes past the processor in one go. Almost every game uses it, and until now the cartridge tested the memory it fills but never the engine. Testing it needs a small trick. While the transfer runs the processor can read nothing but the fast memory at the top of the address space, so the wait loop is copied there and called from the cartridge. Five ways to interrupt a Game Boy A processor that has lost one of its five interrupt sources will still run. A few games break, most carry on regardless, and that is precisely what makes this one of the hardest faults to catch. For a long time the cartridge tested only one of the five, and even that by accident. Every screen here waits for the vertical blank, so that one source has to work or nothing works at all. The new screen asks each source whether it raises its flag. A source sets its bit whether or not interrupts are allowed, so the test switches them off and reads the bits directly. Five sources raise a flag. The sixth line asks whether the processor acts on one. The joypad source is the odd one, because it reports an edge and not a level. A key has to be pressed while the test waits, and a key held down while the line reads no means the edge went missing. That is a fault the bounce screen cannot see. There the contact would look perfectly healthy, because the contact is healthy, and what failed sits behind it. A sixth line takes on the other half of the question, because raising a flag is not the same as acting on it. It uses the timer, the one source that needs neither the screen nor a finger. Every line of the slot, named Until recently, a single number on the system screen did all of this work on its own. The cartridge adds up every byte of its own ROM, across all sixteen banks, and compares the total with the checksum stored in its header. To read every byte it has to reach every address, so every address line and every data line of the slot has to be carrying. A mismatch tells you something is wrong, but not what. A wrong checksum says something is wrong. A named line says which one. A separate screen now walks those lines one at a time. Thirteen address lines are tested in the cartridge memory with a march over the powers of two, which finds a line that hangs and a line that sits on top of another. Two more are tested against the cartridge's own code and across two banks, and the eight data lines with walking ones and zeros. When a line fails, it is named, which is the difference between knowing a slot is dirty and knowing that A7 and D3 are the two not getting through. Three of the thirty-two contacts cannot be tested at all, and the screen says which and why. The clock is received and not measured. The reset line would end the test by ending the program. The audio contact carries sound into the console and cannot be read back, and no licensed game ever used it. The fault that only appears when something moves The slot test walks every line once, and the classic fault of a thirty year old connector is not a dead contact but a loose one. A single measurement cannot find that, however careful it is. A second screen therefore runs the same test over and over, and counts not the result but how often it changes. Wiggle the cartridge gently while it runs. Press on it, lift it a little, turn the console over. The test passes about seven times a second, which is faster than any hand, so a fault lasting a tenth of a second still lands in a figure. The same test, over and over. What is counted is not the result but how often it changes. Even a single change in a thousand repeats is worth taking seriously: it means a contact is dropping out now and then rather than failing outright. And when the count keeps climbing as you press on one particular corner of the cartridge, that corner is where the loose contact sits. Nothing from that screen is written to the record, and that is deliberate. It is an observation made under the tester's fingers rather than a repeatable verdict, because press hard enough and any contact fails. The cartridge checks the cartridge Every screen so far has tested the console. This one turns the lens around onto the board it is plugged into, which is the single part of the whole arrangement nobody can actually see. A cartridge header is a claim. It states which mapper chip is fitted, how much battery backed memory sits beside it, and whether a cell keeps that memory alive. A cheap flash cartridge carries a header copied from a real game and a simplified mapper underneath. That is the cartridge a dumper chokes on, and the one that quietly loses a save. Two columns. The left one is what the header claims, the right one is what the board actually does. The screen measures each claim and sets the two side by side. The mapper is asked for bank zero. An MBC5 maps bank zero into the upper window when bank zero is requested. An MBC1 and an MBC3 give bank one there instead, because they have no bank zero in that window. What is compared is a sum over 256 bytes and not a single byte. The same value sits at the same place in many banks, and a comparison that matches by chance is no comparison. The memory is counted by writing a different value into each of sixteen possible banks and reading all sixteen back. A bank that returns its own value exists. The count stays right even when banks mirror each other: with four banks the writes to zero, four, eight and twelve land in the same cell, only the last of them survives, and four are counted. Two lines are notes rather than verdicts. The write lock asks whether the board accepts a write while the mapper has switched the memory off, and many flash cartridges accept it anyway. The battery line says no mark on the first run after flashing, which is the correct answer and not a fault. One byte per bank is read before the probe and written back afterwards. Nothing else is touched. The log of this cartridge lives in the first bank, and an instrument that overwrites its own records would be a poor one. The link port, mostly without a cable The link port is the one part of a DMG that is open to the world, and bent contacts are common. It was also the last part of the machine that nothing here touched. Most of the test needs no cable. Asking the console to send a byte on its own clock proves the shift register works, and what comes back proves the input line sits where it should with nothing attached, which is high. Asking it to receive on a foreign clock should do nothing at all, and a transfer that completes there means something outside is driving the clock contact. A small plug bridging the output contact to the input contact proves both data lines separately. How to build a test cable (Loopback Plug) The drawing is published as information rather than as instruction. Anyone building the plug works on their own console with their own iron, and that risk is theirs. Contact 1 carries five volts, which is why measuring the finished plug matters more than any other step. Build the loopback plug at your own risk. Contact 1 of the link port carries five volts, so a plug wired wrongly can short that line and damage the console. Check every connection with a meter before the plug ever goes near a Game Boy, and if that is not something you are comfortable doing, stay with the cable-free tests, which cover most of the port anyway. A link cable and a second console test more, and that is the next screen. Two machines, and the only absolute measurement A loopback plug bridges one console to itself, so a fault that affects both data lines alike can hide inside it. Two machines and a cable put the directions on separate wires. It needs this cartridge in both, and it is the one test here that a single console cannot run. Two machines and a cable. One leads, the other answers. That arrangement also reaches the one line a console can never test alone. It produces its own serial clock and has no way of reading it back, so the second machine counts the edges arriving. The third thing it reaches is the crystal, and that is the reason the screen exists. Every other measurement here compares counters that share one crystal, so it can confirm a ratio and never a speed. Both machines time the same stretch, from the end of the first transfer to the end of the last, each on its own counter. They then swap the two figures over the cable. The ratio of those figures is the ratio of the two crystals. What the test cannot say is which of them is wrong: two machines give one of the two, and only a third gives a verdict. The stretch runs about three and a half seconds, and that length is the whole point. The uncertainty sits at the two ends and amounts to some fifteen microseconds either way, which over three and a half seconds comes to roughly four parts per million. Four parts per million is far smaller than the gap you would expect between two perfectly healthy crystals, so the actual number is worth reading, not just the pass or fail beside it. Two crystals of the same grade can legitimately differ by a hundred parts per million and both be fine, so the cartridge treats anything under two hundred as matched. The number also stands on the first page of the report, next to the verdict itself. It is the finest measurement the cartridge makes, and a printed sheet carrying only a verdict would throw it away. Only one console may lead. Leading means driving the clock contact, and two consoles driving it at once are two outputs against each other. Each screen therefore listens by default, and pressing A does not make a console lead at once: it waits a short random moment, still listening, before taking over the clock. Press A on both and whichever one's pause ends first starts leading; the other, still listening, detects it and quietly becomes the follower. Two machines, one cable, a moving ball. The proof that needs no explaining. The same screen also plays a game of pong over the cable. It measures nothing, and every fault it could show the cable test shows earlier and in numbers. It is there because two machines, one cable and a moving ball is the proof that needs no explaining. The one way to reach the power supply Battery voltage cannot be measured, but its effects can. The burn-in screen runs rounds of about two seconds: read the whole cartridge and check the sum, write and read three kilobytes of memory, drive the sound chip. Errors are counted rather than announced, because what matters is the number over time. Rounds of about two seconds, looping. A fault under load shows up here and not in a one second test. Every round writes its state into the cartridge's battery backed memory, and sets a mark. A weak battery or a cold solder joint shows itself as a restart under load, and a restart wipes the screen but not that mark. The next start finds it still set and counts an aborted run. There is a warning on that screen, and it has nothing to do with the test. Cells left to go flat inside a Game Boy leak, and leaking cells destroy the battery terminals. That is the most common way a DMG-01 in a collection is lost. Twenty minutes is a burn-in. A weekend is a repair. One word of caution about the burn-in test The burn-in deliberately keeps a thirty-year-old machine working under load, so only run the burn-in while you are watching it. A short session, a few minutes to shake out a fault, is what it is for. Leaving it running unattended or for very long stretches is not something this project can vouch for, and prolonged continuous use cannot be ruled out as a cause of damage to an old console. If the machine grows warm, behaves strangely or anything smells hot, stop. When in doubt, keep the sessions short and stay in the room. Findings that leave the machine A test that has to be copied out by hand gets copied out wrongly. The report therefore has six pages, and they print either one at a time or all six as one strip. The first is the verdict of every test with the machine number and model. The second is the bounce figures of all eight keys, which until recently appeared on no sheet at all: they lived in the variables of the measuring screen and were gone the moment it was left. Page one: the verdict, the machine number and the model The third is the cartridge itself, the same five lines the CART screen shows, so that a sheet handed over with a flash cartridge says what is on the board. The fourth explains the code on the page after it. Every part of the scanned line is listed there with the value it currently holds, so nobody has to learn a private alphabet to read it. The fifth is the same findings as a QR code, calculated on the Game Boy itself. It names all eight tests and what each one did, and adds the crystal figure, the worst bounce measured on any key, how long the burn-in ran and what the slot was found to contain. The museum cartridge never had to do that, because its codes are fixed and were built in advance. Here the numbers only exist once the tests have run. The sixth names what the cartridge cannot check, and leaves three blank lines for machine, tester and date. It sits last because that is the order the printer hands the pages over, and what has to be filled in by hand should be the sheet on top. Fifth page of the test report: The QR code allows to transfer the test results to the PC A Game Boy Printer plugged into the link port prints the report on the thermal paper the printer was sold with. It asks first whether to print the whole report, which comes out as one continuous strip, or only the page on screen. A slip of paper in the box beats a photograph on a phone that nobody finds again. Asking the printer before asking it for paper Every screen so far tests the console or the board it sits on. The one device the cartridge talks to had never been tested at all, which is an odd gap in a diagnostic tool. A Game Boy Printer is thirty years old, runs on six cells, and its paper has not been manufactured since the turn of the century. The printer screen therefore asks four questions that cost no paper, and only then offers the option to test with real paper. The first asks who is on the cable. A printer answers with 81. Anything else, or silence, and the rest is pointless. The second reads the status byte, which is the printer's own account of itself. Every packet ends with two bytes coming back, the identifier and then the status, and between them they carry everything the printer will ever say: CODE MEANING 81 The identifier of a Game Boy Printer. It comes back with every packet, and anything else means there is nothing on the cable 00 As a status, the answer to hope for: nothing to report 01 A checksum error, which points at the cable rather than the printer 02 Printing at this moment 04 The image buffer is full 08 Data is waiting and unprinted 10 A packet error 20 A paper jam: the motor turns and the encoder does not 40 Some other error 80 The battery is low The screen prints the code beside the words, because the status is a sum of those bits rather than a list of cases. A printer reporting 88 is reporting 80 and 08 at once, which is a flat battery with a page still waiting to come out, and anyone with the manual can check that. The codes above are only the part the test needs. The full protocol behind them, the packets, the four commands and all eight status flags, is laid out in our Game Boy Printer series, and in particular the piece on how the Game Boy Printer works. The third counts the cable. Eight packets go out, and the printer reports in the first bit whether each checksum arrived intact. A loose plug flips single bits, and this is where that shows. There is a counter-probe as well: one packet is sent with a deliberately wrong checksum, and if the printer fails to complain about that one, the clean result of the other eight means nothing. Game Boy successfully connected to the printer The fourth turns the roller by a few lines and asks whether the printer reports a jam. It checks the motor rather than whether paper is loaded, and it says no jam reported rather than claiming the roller turned: a printer reports a jam when the motor runs and the encoder stays silent, so silence from a motor that never started is not a yes. Then come the two tests that use paper, and neither starts without a confirmation. The dot check fires all 160 heaters of the print head, so a dead one appears as a white line running down a printed band. The exposure ladder prints the same pattern at five settings on one continuous strip, which answers a question no datasheet can: how dark this particular roll of paper, at this age, still needs to be. The value chosen from it is kept and used for everything the cartridge prints afterwards. A note on paper. The dot check and the exposure ladder both fire the print head, so use only genuine Game Boy thermal paper. The print head is thirty years old and the paper has not been manufactured since the turn of the century, so it is worth treating both with care. One finding from that screen is worth passing on. Rechargeable cells at 1.2 volts light the power lamp and leave the roller unable to turn, and the printer reports 88: battery low, with data waiting. Six fresh alkaline cells are not a suggestion. The screen goes dark while anything prints, and the cartridge says so before it starts. Printing reads the screen memory, and while the video chip is drawing a line that memory belongs to it. A wiki on the cartridge Numbers are only useful to someone who knows what they mean. The cartridge therefore carries twenty articles about the machine itself, from the processor to the eight board revisions, and every one of them ends at the screen that touches that part. Twenty articles, and each one ends at the screen that touches that part. The article about the screen explains why the display patterns look the way they do. The article about the buttons explains why one broken select line looks exactly like four dead buttons. The last one is the most useful of them, and it is a list of everything the software cannot see. What it refuses to say The cartridge does not hand out a verdict on a machine, and that is deliberate. For memory, the slot and the cartridge itself, a pass or a fail is a fact, and the screen says so. For contact bounce there is no such thing, because nobody has published what a healthy DMG-01 does. What the cartridge suggests instead is comparing the eight keys of one machine with each other, and then that machine with the next one. Pads age together, and the odd one out is the interesting one. That is what the records are for. The most useful article on the cartridge is the one listing what it cannot see. The one part that can be asked There is a question every collector eventually asks of an old machine, which is whether the parts inside it are still the original ones. For most of them software cannot tell. A replacement speaker and a new set of rubber pads look the same from inside the cartridge. The processor is the one exception, and only because it is quietly flawed. Three quirks of the processor. The screen says what it will look at before it looks. Halt is an instruction that stops the processor until something happens. With interrupts switched off while one is already waiting, the original chip does not stop at all, and the byte after halt runs twice. Writing to the register that reports what the picture hardware is doing raises an interrupt that nothing asked for. And sixteen bit arithmetic on an address inside sprite memory destroys a row of it while the picture hardware is reading through that memory. None of the three was designed. They are side effects, and nobody writing a replacement chip would think to copy them. A processor that shows all three was almost certainly made by Sharp for Nintendo, because imitating a fault this obscure is harder than building the part. The halt bug carries the finding on its own, because it has no timing window. It happens or it does not. The other two depend on landing inside a window a few cycles wide, and the screen says so rather than treating a miss as a verdict. Six DMG-01 went through the screen, several runs each. Every one of them answered the same. The byte after halt runs twice, six of ten attempts raise the interrupt that nothing asked for, and the corruption lands on sprite row twenty. There was not a single deviation between machines or between runs. That measurement corrected the cartridge. The threshold for the second probe had been set at eight of ten, on the assumption that the figure would scatter somewhere near the top. The real answer is six, and it never varies, so with the bar set at eight a perfectly healthy machine kept being told to run the test again. All six consoles showed the same six, which is what revealed the threshold of eight was wrong. What the screen cannot say is worth printing too. A good clone can copy a fault that has been published, and these three have been. The processor is one part of a machine, and a genuine chip can sit on a replacement board. An emulator passes the test as well, which is why the screen says as much itself: it counts on a real Game Boy. Three pictures the eye can answer The screen is the other part a collector asks about, and there software really cannot tell. The processor writes into video memory and its part ends there. No wire leads back from the panel, no register says what hangs there, and a replacement kit announces itself nowhere. So the cartridge does the one thing it can. It draws two patterns in which the difference is obvious, and says what to look for. The first flips bars of light and dark twice a second. An original panel needs several frames to follow, so the bars blur towards grey. A modern panel switches in one frame and keeps them sharp. This is the same lag that taught every owner to read a moving sprite by its trail. The second shows the four shades as four columns and asks for the contrast wheel to be turned from end to end. On an original all four travel, and the two middle ones collapse into their neighbours near either end. The third shows the same columns and asks for the machine to be tilted. An original washes out within a few degrees and takes on a green cast. Nothing is measured and nothing is written down. An observation made by eye is not a finding, and a report carrying it would look like a measurement. Tried side by side on an original and on a machine fitted with an IPS panel, all three patterns told the two apart. The contrast wheel turned out to be the most reliable of them, which was the surprise. It does not depend on judging a difference in grey, only on whether anything moves at all. Download and browser emulation GB Test Lab - Browser Version The cartridge runs in a browser on the GB Test Lab page, and the ROM can be downloaded here. A flash cartridge with a working battery is worth looking for, because the records only survive the power being switched off if there is one. Use fresh alkaline cells rather than rechargeables: at 1.2 volts a rechargeable can light the lamp yet leave the printer's roller unable to turn, and a flash cartridge draws more current than an ordinary game. Mind the cartridge's own battery too, because the records only survive a power switch off if that cell is good, and a dying one loses them without a word. One last thing is worth knowing before trying it in a browser. Contact bounce is mechanical, and an emulator switches a key in a single cycle, so every key reads one edge and 00.00 milliseconds whatever the keyboard under the fingers is doing. The link port behaves in much the same way, and the printer screen reports no printer, because there is none on a browser's link port. That is not a fault in the cartridge. It is the clearest possible proof that these screens measure hardware rather than software. It is, in the end, the same instinct as the rest of this collection: write down what the object actually does, with the number next to it, and say plainly where the knowledge stops. A note on use The GB Test Lab is a private, hobby diagnostic tool, offered as-is and used entirely at your own risk; this project cannot accept liability for any damage to a console, cartridge, printer or anything else. It is also a guide rather than a guarantee: a machine that passes here can still carry a fault the cartridge is honest about not being able to see, so treat the results as informed evidence, not a certificate. Changelog The project began in September 2023 and was picked up in bursts whenever time and resources allowed, which is why it took three years to reach a first release. The original notes carried no dates, so the timeline below reconstructs the order of the work as faithfully as memory permits, listed newest first. ...after the first release Added a confirmation before anything prints, which also says the screen will go dark Added clearing of the log, so a cartridge can be handed on without the previous machine's entries Added a notice before the system check, which says the screen goes dark for several seconds Added a rematch in the linked game, started from one machine so the other follows September 2026 Released the first public version of the GB Test Lab, published alongside this Journal article. Added progress messages while printing, so a long job does not look like a hang Added an exposure ladder, five settings on one strip, with the chosen value kept Implemented a dot check that fires all 160 heaters of the print head Extended the wiki to twenty articles, four of them on the printer and the camera Changed the menus to wrap around at both ends Extended the QR code to carry every test by name, with the measurements alongside Extended the report to print whole or one page at a time March 2026 Added PRINTER, four probes that use no paper before anything is printed Added PANEL, screen patterns for what a cartridge cannot measure by itself Added CART, comparing what the cartridge header claims against what the board does Implemented a plain statement of whether this is a real Game Boy Added three documented traits of the processor, observed rather than judged Extended the interrupt screen to name the source of each interrupt August 2025 Unified the footers, so the same key does the same thing on every screen Added idle screens that say what is about to be measured Changed the monitor to interpret its numbers instead of listing them Added printed insert sheets for the case, generated with the build Implemented Quick check: four tests in sequence and one verdict Added a question at start-up, so nothing runs unasked Added a quiet click on every key press, with a setting to switch it off April 2025 Implemented the address decoding test for the cartridge slot Added every interrupt source and the engine that fills the sprite memory Added a game of pong over the same cable Implemented CABLE, which measures one console's crystal against another December 2024 Added a help screen and paging through the longer lists Added one stored record per Game Boy tested Introduced a two-level menu and a findings report over several pages Added a wiki of articles about the machine the cartridge is testing Extended SLOT and LINK to name the line at fault, not only that something is August 2024 Added a title screen and a portrait on the about page Added printing on the Game Boy Printer Implemented the findings as a QR code, calculated on the Game Boy itself Implemented a burn-in run that keeps testing for as long as it is left alone Added a log kept in the cartridge's battery-backed memory May 2024 Implemented all four sound voices, each playable on its own Added screen patterns for stuck pixels, contrast and ghosting Added a battery probe for cartridges that claim to save Implemented the memory test across five areas, each checked for the faults that area can have December 2023 Added a live monitor of what the machine is doing while it runs Implemented the register fingerprint at start-up, which names the model Added an explanation behind SELECT on each test, written in plain words Implemented bounce measurement for every button, pressed and released Added the button test September 2023 Added the frame of the cartridge: menus, paging, footers and the text engine everything is drawn with Settled the toolchain and the cartridge: GBDK-2020 with C, a variable-width font, and battery-backed memory for the findings Defined the scope: a diagnostic cartridge rather than a game, one that also states plainly what it cannot check Researched what a Game Boy can establish about itself, and what needs an instrument outside it The Test Lab belongs to a small family of cartridges the museum made for the Game Boy, next to the GB Museum on a Cartridge, a reference work that runs on the handheld, and Label Boy, its printer label maker.