Keeping up with the recent Game Boy related posts, today we’ll be taking a look at the Game Boy Pocket Printer (MGB-007) which connects to the Game Boy via the link cable and is powered by 6x AA’s.
A few screws later and we’re in.
The thermal print head/motor assembly looks very similar to the one used in the Thermodrucker Printer. Capacitors are decent branded Sanyo/Nichicon ones. On the back, we have ourselves a bodge wire. The battery terminals are starting to corrode. At first it looks like all the vias have corroded but on closer inspection, it’s a green via tent, couldn’t be corrosion as there is a pad named “TP1” which is bare copper and that’s looking fine. There is some weird solder mask corrosion/fading starting on the edges of the board.
Interestingly there is transistor that’s angled and a fuse that’s glued in place, sounds like a thermal fuse, perhaps to protect if the printer jams somehow?
Look at that LED, has it’s one little plastic holder with slots cut out for the the LED terminals to hold it all in place, spared no expense!
We have the main chip, the TMP87PM40AF which is a Toshiba 8-bit MCU with 32KBytes of PROM, 1KBytes of RAM and runs at 8MHz.
The other chip is a Sanyo 64Kbit SRAM (LC3564BM-70).
There are 2 chips labelled “593A” which goes to the printer so likely just some level shifters.
And that’s all.
Cool piece of kit. Shame you can’t buy compatible thermal sticker rolls anywhere, seeing as the original rolls are 20+ years old and images come out faded.
I wonder what kind of hack/adapter you could make for the GB printer!
I’ve got Game Boy pocket printer with GB pocket, GB Camera and link cable. All seem to work well separately. GB plays the games, camera takes pictures and pirnter does the test print, I have tested the link cable and it seem okay, but when I connect printer to GB it gives me error 02, which means that it’s not properly connected. I know it’s hard to tell from distance, but do you have any idea what can be wrong?