MODBOY

MODBOY rebuilds the Game Boy to be performed, not reproduced, and to perform it you have to own every part of it. the original, Color and Advance: emulated faithfully and wired into Max for Live, where every channel is a stem and every part of the running chip is a knob. load a real cartridge, route it through Ableton, and play the machine itself, take it apart or break it on purpose.

Picture

the screen renders live on the device face, the dot-matrix green of the original or real, punchy color on Color and Advance, scaled clean from 1× to 4×. a floating monitor pops out when you want it, with period LCD ghosting and a subpixel grid you can switch on.

Sound

every channel comes out on its own, the two pulses, the wavetable, the noise, and on Advance the two Direct Sound streams, each a stem you could never pull off the hardware. a companion Speaker receives MODBOY and lets you gain or mute any channel of the game on its own track, with a live scope that reads real data straight from the game: pulse position, wavetable numbers, noise and the Advance PCM. morph the timbre of each voice like a synth oscillator. the Speaker is your way into MODBOY’s chip, every voice, and every bend, driven from there.

Bend

MODBOY is circuit bending in software: it reaches into the live state of the emulated chip and corrupts it while the game runs, no soldering iron, nothing destroyed.

drop the battery and the sound sags and saturates like a handheld dying mid-song, the pitch holds while everything around it gives way. bend the clock to starve the pitch down, or hold it and let it wow and flutter. or push corruption into the Direct Sound FIFO, the wave RAM, the PSG registers and VRAM, and the game engine reacts, the picture and sound glitch together from one source.

the glitches are real, it’s the chip itself coming apart, but unlike a real circuit bend every move is a knob you automate, recall and undo. the same break, in tune, take after take.

Play

drive the d-pad and buttons from MIDI, from LFOs or from Live’s automation, on a mapping you set yourself, and modulate every input the way you would a synth. a real-time clock tracks day and night; pick a game, set the look, and perform it. it runs the tools the scene already lives on, LSDj, Nanoloop, FMS and other Game Boy audio software, a bridge between the limits of the hardware and the power of a DAW.

Under the hood

two cores in C++17 behind one interface: the Game Boy and Color based on Peanut-GB, reworked for MODBOY, and the Advance a hand-written ARM7TDMI from scratch, full ARM and Thumb, the three-stage pipeline, seven processor modes with banked registers, the barrel shifter, DMA, timers and interrupts. each frame runs on an exact cycle budget, 280,896 on the Advance, so the timing never drifts. all three externals are native, signed Max objects, no bridge, no wrapper, no emulator binary bolted on.

it stays honest about accuracy: the Game Boy core is M-cycle accurate with a scanline-accurate screen and passes Blargg and dmg-acid2, the Advance drives all six video modes, affine sprites, windows and blending, and runs commercial games to real gameplay.

it boots with no BIOS, high-level emulation stands in for the chip, so most games play straight from the cartridge with nothing to obtain. a few Advance titles want a real BIOS, you can drop your own in, MODBOY tries its own boot first and only reaches for it when a game won’t start.

Real time

the audio is its own engine. each modboy~ reads the shared core through its own pointer in a lock-free ring, so the voices split clean across tracks, with an 80ms cushion, underruns that hold the last sample instead of crackling, and short fades that hide every seam. the chip is band-limited and cubic-interpolated, with per-voice analog drift so nothing phase-locks, and it retunes itself when the host sample rate changes.

emulation is paced by the wall clock on a strict budget, it drops frames before it ever stalls Live. saves are written off the audio thread, and the console’s clock runs on real time.

owning the core is the point: every register the chip computes is one you can read, route or bend.