GBVideoPlayer2

GBVideoPlayer

GBVideoPlayer is a technical demonstration that pushes the Game Boy Color's hardware to its limits by enabling it to play full-motion color video with synchronized music. It showcases innovative hardware hacking techniques to overcome the console's severe memory and processing constraints, achieving what was previously thought impossible on the 8-bit platform. ## Key Features - **Hardware LCD Controller Hacking** — Manipulates the Game Boy Color's LCD controller to bypass its tile-based graphics system and display video frames. - **Custom Video Encoding Pipeline** — Uses a two-stage encoder (Photoshop batch script + Python) to compress video into a format the Game Boy can process. - **Cycle-Accurate Z80 Assembly** — The player core is written in highly optimized Z80 assembly with precise CPU cycle counting for real-time playback. - **Compact Music Format** — Music is stored in a custom binary format converted from an OpenMPT-style textual representation for efficient playback. - **Frame Repetition Compression** — Encoder can skip similar frames by repeating a single frame up to 127 times to save ROM space. ## Philosophy The project embraces extreme optimization and hardware exploitation to achieve seemingly impossible results on constrained retro hardware, following in the spirit of demoscene projects like 8088 Corruption.