Skawo on Link’s Awakening DX’s Rumble Support

The Game Boy doesn’t have a Rumble Pak. Of course it doesn’t; where would you slot it? But a few games were released for the Game Boy Color (and Game Boy Advance too) that have built-in rumble motors. Because of this, it’s impossible, with unmodified physical hardware, to separate the Rumble from the Pak. If the game supports rumble, it has the motor included; if it doesn’t support rumble, it won’t have the motor. Pretty simple. Except. Some people discovered, if you put Link’s Awakening DX onto some flash carts with a rumble motor included, there is a point during the game where the rumble will activate. Skawo on Youtube looked at the game’s code and sought an answer as to why. (10 minutes) The tl;dw: GBC rumble motors are controlled via a MBC5 chip, a chip not dissimilar to the now-famous MMC line of chips on the NES/Famicom. Writes to ROM space are caught by the chip and used to activate functions. The main purpose for these chips is to switch between memory banks, but one bit in…