
A lot of us had a Gameboy back in the ’90s, but not many of us dreamt of turning it into a super synthesiser. Well, Sam Battle aka Look Mum No Computer is not a lot of us and with his latest build, the ‘Gameboy Mega-Machine’ he plans to do just that.
We say this every time, but Look Mum No Computer is really undertaking his most insane project yet – a synth built from a wall of 48 Game Boys.
One of LMNC first ever video uploads featured a Gameboy Triple Oscillator played through an Arduino Boy MIDI interface, the video helped everyone’s favourite synth fanatic gain a bit of traction and fame to continue his synthesiser experiments.
But now Battle is giving the design a bit of an upgrade and instead of three Game Boys, he plans on building a synth with 48. That’s right, an eight by six wall of Game Boys. It’s a huge undertaking and this first video mainly details the planning stage and some experiments, such as adding frequency modulation from a sperate voltage source into the clock speed, which in itself produces a thick synthesis through just one Game Boy.
In the video LMNC also experiments by synching six game boys together in sequence, all units running at the same speed. In a side note he also details that the final machine will be able to play the same game simultaneously on all 48 Game Boys, as LMNC explains below (read in his voice):
“Another posed use for this that I didn’t mention, which I realised after planning it out, is im making it in such a way, that if you group all of the buttons together, you can actually play the same game, 50 times over. im after 50 official copies of Tetris? (seems like the most popular easy to come by) to make a video on it when its complete! if anyone has a copy going spare?”
The synthesiser maverick is actually on a hunt for more Gameboys, so if you have one lying around and feel like donating to a noble cause head on over to the Look Mum No Computer Website.
It will be very interesting to see how this one pans out, stay tuned!