Ukelele tuner for the Gameboy Advance

GameBoy ukelele tuner screenshot

This weekend I went for a relaxing vacation in a cottage somewhere around Haliburton, Ontario. This is usually also a good opportunity for me to try and remember some chords on the Ukelele that my girlfriend bought for my birthday a couple of years ago. The only problem I have is that I don’t know how to tune the thing. Normally, I would go to a site like the online Ukelele tuner before I get started. But without a computer and internet access, I would be stuck with no way to tune the Ukelele in the cottage.

Luckily, after a bit of thinking and half an hour of coding, I came up with a tuner that I flashed into one of the Gameboy Advance units I have for the OpenEADL project (check it out). The tuner worked great, and because the Gameboy is so power efficient, I didn’t have to charge it even once in the whole weekend!

You can download the code for the tuner from here (I included the compiled ukelele-advance.gba ROM). If you want to know how to modify, compile and flash the ROM into a Gameboy cartridge, read this tutorial. You can also run the ROM in an emulator like VisualBoy Advance