Ah yeah, I just understood your comment wrong then. It would indeed be cool to have symmetric two way communication. You could completely MIDIfy toy instruments, household machines etc. pretty conveniently then.

I still think you could pull it off easily (okay, easily if you know a bit about what you are doing and can read tutorials) with Arduino, though. It’s a bit bigger physically and has different power requirements, but I think it would have 12 free digital pins even after you hook up the MIDI output port. You could even have both input and output with the same board if you spent some time hooking up a multiplexer or two, but that would obviously take some more effort.

Programming the I/O logic for something like that is pretty painless: just scan the inputs successively, check whether they’re high / low, and send a couple of serial bytes to the MIDI output. And the other way round, read incoming MIDI messages and set the output pins accordingly.

Granted, it isn’t the same and it requires a bit more tweaking than MIDIFY does, but it could be a good alternative to many projects.

I don’t know if I understood you correctly or not but it IS an input model - you connect MIDI data source you have (sequencer, keyboard, whatever) to the board, and it turns the 12 outputs high / low based on incoming MIDI data.
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yeah I know. I was thinking 12 logic inputs…outputs midi data. mice and symmetrical. That way you could hook up the buttons to the input module and the gameboy to the output module. Then you could record and playback the device using a midi sequencer.

I was just thinking about uses for a MIDIFY’d Gameboy… The first thing that came to my mind was that you could actually have prerecorded MIDI sequences that played a game from start to end. Sort of like replays in the classic 3D shooters. Even though I can think of many ideas that are fun in a geeky way, that must be in the current top 10.

Yes, I realize that. But think about it. If you do actually have time/effort/knowledge/skill to employ something like MIDIFY - which basically requires you to solder the 12 paraller outputs to different pins, or at least a bunch of them, solder the MIDI connector or the jack to it, connect power lines, and program the signals it will send out - you won’t find what I said too hard to learn or comprehend.

I’m no electronics whiz. In fact, I suck at electronics and basically know nothing whatsoever about the subject. And I’m a newbie coder at best. But I still manage to do stuff for fun. You just need not to be scared about actually trying things out, and reserve some time to actually try out said things. If I can get MIDI out of Arduino in one evening and trigger a MIDI synth with a piezo trigger (and jump in joy after getting it to work), I’m pretty sure about everyone who’s interested at all can do it.