Watara Supervision Technical information
- gozdnijezek
- 4 hours ago
- 1 min read
The Supervision is a Gameboy "clone" or look a like. It is its own platform but the "inspiration" is hard to hide. It was sold in many countries, under many different names. In the US, it was simply sold as the "Supervision". The branding on it is "Watara", and it has a vaguely Gameboy-like look, but the screen can be angled up or down via a hinge below the display proper.
The top half contains the actual game hardware, a 160*160 LCD, the main PCB with a glop-top ASIC which is the "brains", and two 8K SRAMs. The two 8K SRAMs are 6264's or equivalent, and are physically glop-tops on little tiny carrier boards.
The cartridges seem to support up to 128K byte ROMs, but as far as we know, the games were only as large as 64K bytes. There are a few 4 in 1 multicarts which might be 128K bytes, but contain games that were previously released on separate carts.
A quick disassembly "guide":
GrenderG has a comprehensive guide on the technical aspects of the Watara Supervision on his github: https://github.com/GrenderG/supervision_reveng_notes
Now you can get an open source flash cart for the Supervision (note it can only load one game at the time, but is very cheap and simple): https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/Watara_Supervision_flash_cart_Superpico_5c2a9747.html
There were only 60 unique games released for this console and they mostly feel incomplete compared to the GameBoy library.
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