I recently bought a GBxCart RW, which lets you both read and flash ROMS on cartridges for the GameBoy, GameBoy Color, and GameBoy advance. While looking at the DevTerm specs again today I realized that the expansion port has to be more than 58 mm wide, since it fits the mechanism for the 58 mm thermal paper just fine. GBx cartridges are 57mm wide, so one should fit in no problem. What if there was an extension module that used the expansion port as a cartridge slot, so that you could play your old games straight off the cartridge, apply patches to them, and more? I definitely don’t have the circuit design skills necessary for this, but someone else wants to try it out that’d be amazing!
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Cool idea. But let’s be frank, based on what I think, this is way harder.
What you shall do is either (1) put the whole gameboy mother board in and display the game on the screen (need a new board for display issue, comparatively speaking, the IO is an easier issue); or (2) read the cartridge only, and emulate the game.
If you choose plan 2, then this will be rather easy, you can find solutions like gameboy-Andiord-phone-thing. But, if you do so, whey not just emulate from the beginning?
I bought the Hyperkin Smartboy back when that seemed like a good idea. With a little dismantling and 3D printing you could probably use the thermal printer port as a cart slot!
Oh, I was thinking as an emulator and ROM manipulation utility, not straight playing a real GameBoy. That’s why I linked the GBxCart, since it shows what I want to do already.
But, if you do so, whey not just emulate from the beginning?
because it would be cool as hell to have a gameboy cartridge sticking out the back of my DevTerm. No other substantial reason. I think it’d be cool as hell to use a cyberdeck to read and write GameBoy cartridges, especially since I’m working on a GBC game myself.
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That’s exactly my plan! You wouldn’t even need any 3D printing; the expansion port slot is already big enough to fit GB cartridges. All you’d need to do is create a new extension board with the necessary port.
If so, that will be fun. I may do something on that.
got near the same project for pokitto, a french guy who create a compatible gbx card reader was created the pcb and i’m done the soft, it use two mcp23s17 multiplexer who allow read/write and directly done 5v/3v level change.
soft is based on a Rlyeh fork of gnuboy for the gp32, i rewrited all the gameboy “gpu” part to fit into the 32k ram of pokitto’s cortex m0+.
card access is done directly on demand.
project is currently frozen, pokitto not giving the necessary power to feed the gb card dc requirement, occasional read write work fine but constant not, answering bad values 
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