GoKawiilPower consumption of Game Boy flash cartridges
Flash cartridges (= "carts") are commonly used to run Game Boy ROMs, such as homebrew games or dumped officially released games, on real hardware. Different kinds of flash carts with various features and performance characteristics have been available for a long time, but flash carts have in general the reputation of consuming a lot of power, greatly reducing the battery life of a Game Boy system, and possibly causing other additional problems. System stability might suffer, especially on Game Boy Pocket, and flash carts can also increase audible noise. Many of these problems have become more obvious in the recent years, since Game Boy modding is nowadays very popular and many modern mods, such as IPS screens, consume a lot of extra power. Some people claim that certain mods are simply incompatible with flash carts, and sometimes people say an extra regluator mod is needed in order to safely use flash carts. There is some truth to these claims, but unfortunately the fine details tend to matter and these kind of blanket statements can be misleading!
In order to research the topic, I tested the power consumption of several commonly available flash carts and some of my own designs. In this blog post I intend to show that there is more variation in flash cart power consumption than people might think, and a flash cart can even be more power efficient than a genuine cart!
Tested cartridges
Genuine Tetris from 1997
This is a genuine Tetris cart from 1997 that uses a glop top mask ROM. Since there are no other chips (e.g. MBC or RAM) on the board and the mask ROM capacity is small, the power consumption is very low. This simplicity means the cartridge presents a tough challenge for more complicated flash carts in power consumption tests.
Genuine Pokemon Blue from 1998
This is a genuine Pokemon Blue cartridge with a very typical ROM+RAM+MBC chip combination. While the exact chips used may vary, this kind of combination is very common in officially released Game Boy games. This is why it provides a more realistic comparison point than Tetris.
Cheap reproduction Pokemon Blue
This is a cheap reproduction cartridge I bought from AliExpress for research purposes. It has clearly been designed with only cost in mind, because the design violates some chip ratings and does not even have PCB edge gold fingers. A poorly designed cartridge that would undoubtedly not survive constant use for very long, but it's still interesting to include it in the comparison.
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