Old Gold Boat - GameBoy OS

Controls

WASD	Move / cursor
K	A button - confirm, fire
J	B button - back, cancel
M	Start - open the lid, pause
N	Select - rotate a part

Little Story

20XX. You have it all now: ray tracing, 4K, a phone that finishes your sentences. Then a call. The old house is being sold, come get whatever is still yours.

Down in the basement, under a pile of comics, there's a shoe box. Still heavy. Inside is the GameBoy you got as a kid. Dusty, sticky buttons. Does it still work?

How to play

Once the GameBoy boots into GBOS, the top row of the desktop has four places to rummage through, one per era: the bookshelf back home (70s-80s), a dead mall stockroom (90s-00s), the basement (00s-10s) and your own desk drawer (10s-20s). Later eras cost scrap to get into.

Rummage. Pull out a random machine, shake it, and parts fall out. Drops follow the hardware: a calculator won't give you RAM, a games console might. 64 machines and 26 kinds of parts in total, plus a few rare ones (DIP, DSP, GPU, SoC) if you're lucky.

Solder. Back on the desktop, press Start (M) to open the lid. Drag the parts you salvaged onto the matching contacts on the board, press Select (N) to rotate them, then hit the return arrow on screen to power it up.

• CPU - the units (CU, ALU, REG) have to form an unbroken powered chain from the power pin. A bigger chip isn't always better if it blocks the trace you needed.
• WRAM - four slots scored one at a time, following the loop arrow printed on the board. Every core on a card has a chance to be a dead cell, and a card only ever rolls once, so a good card stays good.
• VRAM - four slots that go into the formula printed on the board: A x B + C x D. Put your best cards where the multiplication happens.
• Battery - the seat in the corner takes whatever cells fell out of the machines (LR44 from a calculator, AA from a GameBoy, lithium from a phone).And their total mAh is your health bar in the game.

Run BoyMark afterwards to see your FPS, draw speed and total score.

Old Gold Boat. The cartridge in the slot. A first-person dungeon crawler through three pirate ships, five rooms each, ending at the octopus on the deck.You start with a revolver; win a 1911, a Glock, an AK from the gunsmith, if the gunsmith feels like it.

Your hardware is the graphics settings:

• CPU - resolution, frame rate, fire rate
• VRAM - view distance
• WRAM - how many enemies can be on screen at once,if low WRAM, you may hit by invisible guy.
• Battery - your health. Every hit drains it. Run out and the ship goes dark.

Batteries also wear. After every run each cell loses some health, and the more you drained it the more it loses; drop below 10% and it's gone for good. Get hit a lot and you'll be back in the junk pile looking for fresh cells.

Everything you loot down there is scrap. Scrap is money. Money buys your way into the next era. Then you come back with better parts and the boat runs a bit smoother.

Quit any time from the pause menu and keep your scrap.

There's also a two-player co-op mode if you have a friend and WIFI chip!!!

Core chips

Some of these old machines have a small chance of dropping their core chip when you shake them: a 1x1 part with every contact open. Solder one onto a powered spot on the CPU board and, besides scoring like any other unit, it adds a new app to the GBOS desktop. Pull it out and the app is gone.

A calculator drops a calculator chip, a digital pet drops a pet chip, a stopwatch shows up somewhere too,and more...waiting you figured out. Each app hides a little game that pays out scrap. My favourite is TAPE, the music player that walkman-type machines tend to drop: it plays every BGM in the game, and press Select in it for Play Along, a rhythm mode across the whole album. The charts weren't hand-tuned, but it's a good time.

About that DEV app

It is not just a picture puzzle. Finish it and go play the boat again. That's all i'll say.

Why "Old Gold"

Nothing in this game is bought new. Every chip on your board came out of something that was thrown away. Not all of it shines, most of it has scratches and stickers, but it powers up. And you know, The Old Gold Boat Game is "Old Gold" too.

Also in the box

• A Codex app with every machine and part you've found, it all have a little description to let people who don't know that legend old gold.