> I quickly discovered I’d accidentally put the footprint for my FPC connector on backwards:
That's how you tell the professionals from the novices! The professionals only get it wrong once. Per connector, of course. The novices can get it wrong up to five times, which is really impressive! (The novice in question may or may not have been me.)
I absolutely adore the Game Boy modding scene that’s exploded in the last few years.
Case overhauls like this or the Boxypixel slab pictured in the article, numerous backlit high-res IPS screen replacements, mods to improve sound, Li-ion battery packs with USB charging. And that’s to say nothing of Analogue or the MiSTer project, creating full FPGA reimplementations of the hardware.
It’s a really cool example of what some very creative and passionate people can do with commodity technology. The only downside is it’s actually becoming quite pricey to get original hardware.
Retro Future on YouTube has made some similarly cursed builds, such as the original GBA but with a hinged screen for some reason, and double screen GBA SP (it shows the same image on two screens).
Sadly the original hardware is slowly degrading over time. Nintendo DS lite screens for example are all yellowing at this age. Buttons suffer too, my gameboy color is just a paperweight now because the buttons hardly register a press. Maybe these issues can be repaired but I’m not skilled with a soldering iron which is a big requirement it seems.
I run a video games business and fix button issues all the time!
All you'll need to do to fix a GBC with stuff buttons is open it up (requires a tri wing screwdriver, $2 from eBay), clean the button pads with a q-tip and alcohol.
The pads in question are the black bits on the back of the rubber immediately underneath the button, as well as the circular copper traces on the board that the black bits come into contact with when you depress the button.
You might need 3 or 4 q-tips. You'll know when you're done because the q-tips will stop turning black.
Takes 10 minutes overall and is only slightly more technical than wiping your arse! Don't be intimidated!
I bought a no solder IPS screen for gameboy color. Think I bought the kit off eBay, it came with a new case and buttons too. It's pretty great! (And if I can do it anyone can)
The GBC is quite easy to disassemble (If you have one of Nintendo's silly triwing screwdrivers). Give the pads under the buttons a rub with some isopropyl, and at an extreme buy some new conductive silicone pads for about £8 online.
No soldering required to get you back up and running.
It's relatively easy to learn soldering basics, and even if you're not good at soldering, it's pretty forgiving (especially on older hardware where the components aren't so finicky).
For what it’s worth, I’ve managed to successfully mod a Game Boy Advance as a total soldering noob, with a cheap poor quality iron from Amazon. Some mods (particularly for home consoles) are difficult as all hell if you’re inexperienced, but the Game Boy tends to be fairly easy-going. There’s also an increasing number of mods (particularly screens) that are slightly more expensive, but are solder-less (or solder optional). Macho Nacho on YouTube covers quite a few of them.
As for your buttons, you can buy new rubber membranes that make contact with the board to register the press. Give the board a good clean with isopropyl and pop some new membranes in and your buttons will no doubt be good as new—no soldering needed!
I used to suck with a soldering iron, but if it's something that interests you, just give it a shot.
If you're deathly afraid of making mistakes, get a desoldering iron. If you mess up just suck the solder up, reapply a bit of flux as necessary, and try again.
I love it too, though I wish that along with it there was renewed interest in Gameboy game development. There are GB game-jams, but more-often-than-not the results of those just languish in obscurity rather than seeing any community attention; and so there's no incentive to put any polish into these titles. (There's nobody trying to make anything like David Murray's Planet X3 for the GB scene.)
I feel like something that would really kick such an ecosystem off, would be some sort of wi-fi-enabled GB/GBC flash-cart, which boots to Mario-Maker-like UX for downloading, playing, and reviewing (liking/disliking, making playlists of, etc) bite-sized GB/GBC experiences from a community-maintained cloud service; where the supply side of that cloud service would be easy upload integration with tools like GB Studio.
There’s loads of homebrew Gameboy games released each year. One of my friends reviews games and receives lots of new GB and GBA titles.
You can also get GB carts that support SD card. I appreciate you’re describing a more complete, end to end, UX but we can already do everything right up to inserting the SD card into the Gameboy cart. With Gameboy emulation as good as it is, you could do away with original hardware for 99% of players too (though for me, the joy of retro gaming is using the original hardware. But I’d never look down on anyone who preferred emulation).
I didn't say people don't make them. I said they aren't polished. And by that, I don't mean the gameplay!
Rather, I mean that nobody's fabbing GB game carts, printing glossy color manuals for them, putting them in boxes, and shipping them to Kickstarter backers. Nobody's translating these games into 10 languages. Nobody's QA-testing the heck out of them to ensure they don't have any obscure edge-case bugs. Etc. (This was why I brought up Planet X3: it's an example of a modern retro-game that is polished in exactly this sense.)
But a desire to go through all the effort to create polished modern GB games, is the sort of thing that requires market demand — a willingness to spend real money to buy new GB games (whether digitally or physically.) No hobbyist game developer is going to spend a year on "things that aren't programming" to make a nice shippable product out of their game, if that isn't going to result in at least breaking even on their effort.
And a prerequisite for that demand, is public awareness of the fact that modern GB games are being created — and, more importantly, a public "brand" awareness for the people creating them!
Indie game jams are great and all; but they don't create brand awareness. App Stores with "studios with most stars" views create brand awareness. Easily one-click accessibility of the games to allow them to be played on a PC (rather than on a portable with no video-capture support), to enable streamers and content-creators to play them on a whim, create brand awareness. Gamedev tooling that expects/requires a "publisher logo card" to be shown on boot, create brand awareness. Etc.
Basically, think of "modern gameboy games" as if they were a thing made by one company, rather than a diffuse community. What would that company be doing to market them? The community can do those things too!
> Rather, I mean that nobody's fabbing GB game carts, printing glossy color manuals for them, putting them in boxes, and shipping them to Kickstarter backers.
Maybe not Kickstarter specifically, but they are doing the other stuff.
> Nobody's translating these games into 10 languages.
That's a little unreasonable ask. Given how little money these games will bring in you can't expect that.
> Nobody's QA-testing the heck out of them to ensure they don't have any obscure edge-case bugs. Etc. (This was why I brought up Planet X3: it's an example of a modern retro-game that is polished in exactly this sense.)
There is QA testing happening but like with the above, you can't expect smaller operations to pay people to QA. So you end up either having "QA" be demo builds, in which case most people end up with a copy so you can't do the premium carts that you're also asking for. Or you just have to accept that QA is a smaller operation but still have the beautiful hardware copy.
Even really well polished games on other platforms with much bigger audiences, like Xeno Crisis for the Mega Drive / Genesis, have had their share of bugs too. Even in the original days of these consoles, when games from big studios with big budgets to spend on testing, we'd still see new releases with bugs-galore.
> But a desire to go through all the effort to create polished modern GB games, is the sort of thing that requires market demand — a willingness to spend real money to buy new GB games (whether digitally or physically.) No hobbyist game developer is going to spend a year on "things that aren't programming" to make a nice shippable product out of their game, if that isn't going to result in at least breaking even on their effort.
This doesn't even happen with new games on current generation consoles. So I don't understand why you're expecting it to happen with retro-consoles.
> And a prerequisite for that demand, is public awareness of the fact that modern GB games are being created — and, more importantly, a public "brand" awareness for the people creating them!
I don't think awareness is the problem. I think most people just don't care. If you're a retro gamer you are probably already aware, and if you're not then you're never going to play these games anyway. And I honestly can't blame people for not caring. There's so much content out there these days that GB games (with all the warts that the GB hardware had, by modern day standards) simple aren't going to appeal to most people.
I think you're setting your expectations far too high.
> Indie game jams are great and all; but they don't create brand awareness
Again, there are plenty of releases that aren't the results of game jams.
> This doesn't even happen with new games on current generation consoles. So I don't understand why you're expecting it to happen with retro-consoles.
It absolutely does. What do you think https://www.nicalis.com/ as a studio does? They take hobbyists' indie games, acquire distribution rights, and polish them so they can see console release.
Also consider: ports. What is the re-release of Shantae for Switch, if not someone spending a year polishing an (admittedly already polished by 2002 standards) GBC game into a product non-retro-gamers are willing to pay for?
> If you're a retro gamer you are probably already aware, and if you're not then you're never going to play these games anyway.
...why not? I think you're setting your expectations too low.
People pay for (polished) Steam and console releases of RPG Maker games; and those often have far less effort or thought put into the gameplay, replayability, etc. than these games do.
Though the real point of comparison that should be made, is the market for indie commercial homebrew releases for non-portable consoles; which is thriving even among non-retro-gamers, in a way that the market for portables, isn't.
• Consider: there are more people out there commercializing just the ROMhacks of Super Mario World (by doing full engine rewrites of games that were already full asset replacements, to get away from Nintendo's IP, and then selling the results on console stores!) than there are GB/GBC/GBA game authors attempting to commercialize their games.
• Consider: there are tons of game streamers, speedrunners, genre-specific content creators (e.g. horror-game Lets Play-ers), etc, who play new console retro-games if and only if they come packaged in some accessible format. So they'll play Steam or console-store releases of these retro games; they'll play PC-accessible downloadables like Mario Multiverse or PokeWilds; but they won't touch a raw emulator. And, by-and-large, the developers of these new old-home-console titles are aware of that, and produce/port/polish their releases so that they can be consumed in this way, and so can generate virality. I don't see anything like that happening in the new old-portable games space.
> It absolutely does. What do you think https://www.nicalis.com/ as a studio does? They take hobbyists' indie games, acquire distribution rights, and polish them so they can see console release.
They're not the games studio doing it, so it literally proves my point. These people could just as easily do it for the GB games too but they know there's no money in it.
> ...why not? I think you're setting your expectations too low. People pay for (polished) Steam and console releases of RPG Maker games; and those often have far less effort or thought put into the gameplay, replayability, etc. than these games do.
Because those games are cheap as chips and don't require an original Gameboy to play them. Given your point was about polished cart releases, the requirement to own a Gameboy is a pretty big hurdle for people who are only casually interested in retro games.
Then there's the other points I've already outlined: Gameboy graphics, much as I loved them at the time, haven't aged well. Even modern pixel art is very different to the 4 toned shades of grey on a 160x144 matrix.
> Though the real point of comparison that should be made, is the market for indie commercial homebrew releases for non-portable consoles; which is thriving even among non-retro-gamers, in a way that the market for portables, isn't.
Thriving is over-stating the market. There's a lot of resellers driving the prices up but the market for actual retro gamers is a lot smaller than the market bubble suggests. A lot of non-retro gamers bought their NES or PlayStation "mini's" but then went back to their current gen PlayStation/Xbox a few weeks later; leaving their retro system to collect dust. Even the emulators bundled with Nintendo's Switch Online membership mostly gets played by people who are already retro gamers, while the rest of the Switch's demographic prefer either Nintendo's first party games or the range of indie offerings.
And even if we take your comment at face value, you're still ignoring my point that the Gameboy has aged probably the worst of any console. Except maybe the Atari 2600. Don't get me wrong, I do love my Gameboy. But serious concessions were made in it's hardware design to facilitate it's long battery life. This made the device a fantastic handheld in the 90s but a terrible platform for modern gamers who aren't already bought into retro gaming. Sure you might get the odd non-retro gamer pick it up for nostalgia purposes (like with the NES Classic) but that's not going to be a sustainable source of income.
> Consider: there are more people out there commercializing just the ROMhacks of Super Mario World (by doing full engine rewrites of games that were already full asset replacements, to get away from Nintendo's IP, and then selling the results on console stores!) than there are GB/GBC/GBA game authors attempting to commercialize their games.
Are there? Do you actually have some data to back up that claim? Have you done any in-depth analysis here or just pulling guestimates out of your arse? And even if you are correct (which I doubt), what difference does it make? The two aren't related. They're not even mutually exclusive.
> Consider: there are tons of game streamers, speedrunners, genre-specific content creators (e.g. horror-game Lets Play-ers), etc, who play new console retro-games if and only if they come packaged in some accessible format. So they'll play Steam or console-store releases of these retro games; they'll play PC-accessible downloadables like Mario Multiverse or PokeWilds; but they won't touch a raw emulator. And, by-and-large, the developers of these new old-home-console titles are aware of that, and produce/port/polish their releases so that they can be consumed in this way, and so can generate virality. I don't see anything like that happening in the new old-portable games space.
There are absolutely shit loads of retro gamer streamers out there too. In fact I'm doing a stream myself tonight.
Disclaimer: as well as being a retro gamer and streamer myself, I know a number of relatively high profile people in the gaming and retro-gaming circles. Some who are resellers, some who are games researchers and some who are games journalists too. A couple of which are also really big fans of the GB, GBC and GBA so frequently get sent new games for review (albeit those games don't usually get published in magazines because, and I quote "not enough people are interested in the Gameboy". But they will publish reviews online).
Yeah I've rebuilt a GBC & GBA with nice new oled screens. Both completely transparent; cases, buttons even the membranes all see-through.
I've gotta take the GBA apart again to fix a d-pad issue but other than that they're perfect. Slowly building up a collection of games for them again, too.
Didn't even know this was a thing. And I immediately fell in love. What a great hobby. I remember my first game boy. You could probably knock someone out throwing it. And it would be fine.
I'm always amazed and impressed by the amount of effort and energy needed for those ultimately "useless" (said not in a sarcastic way) personnal projects... I personnaly absolutely can't muster so much efforts for almost anything. And sooo would love to be able to...
As someone who can’t even solder, it’s fun! Messing with my gameboy color, N64, and Dreamcast, and made me more comfortable screwing around with electronics. Been learning slowly but surely!
I professionally solder about 2 to 3 time a week to replace mainly dead capacitors, broken USB or DC power jack connectors, as well as a few SO*-8 EEPROM chips. Became quite good at it after 20 years. But at the end of the day, prices are on the rise in western europe while personal energy is low. I must admit I'm equally ashamed to not be able to do more and being envious.
Still, always a pleasure for a tech guy to scroll through a bonafide geek project.
Loved the page of the guy that mapped and memory-injected a WD hdd PCB Marvell's ARM cores to ultimately install its own linux kernel on it.
I never liked the SP form factor. It’s too cramped. The original GBA is absolutely perfect. It’s like a DS without the weight of the top screen. It’s too bad it couldn’t have had the SP 101 model backlit screen.
I actually loved the SP, perfect form factor for your pocket.
But I agree that the normal Advance would benefit greatly from a backlight. For what it was, I'm surprised how well the external light you could buy held up (connector & flex cable)
Personally, I find the gameboy advance sp one of the slickest designs ever. You could say that the sp is one of the most iterated on designs in later nintendo products
Agreed. The DS is a similar size to the GBA, but it’s much bigger and heavier. Even as a kid I could have a GBA in my pocket and not think too much of it. And the horizontal form factor was really nice to hold. The only really flaw was the lack of backlit screen.
I think exactly the same. Even though the SP design was more successful and influential for consoles like the DS series, the shape of the original GBA is not only very comfortable but also pretty darn iconic!
Wikipedia says: «As of December 31, 2009, the Game Boy Advance series has sold 81.51 million units worldwide, 43.57 million of which are Game Boy Advance SP units and 2.42 million of which are Game Boy Micro units.»
So, the SP was the most sold version, but I can't name a single GBA emulator that uses its design as the logo.
I always felt that way too however after coming back to the GBA with now with larger adult hands it's also too cramped for me. its way too unwieldy and heavy but I feel like I would need something like a GameGear these days.
Agree, the gba is the perfect handheld system. I was feeling nostalgic and wanted to play one recently but they were selling for ~$150 so I went with an ANBERNIC RG351P instead. Same form factor
But the thing is, they're _not_ the same form factor. I've been somewhat interested in getting one of these new emulator snc devices like Anbernic makes, and the 351 is the most interesting - but man, if they sold one that looked just like an original GBA, I'd have already pulled the trigger.
While looking into it recently, I kinda came to the conclusion that the best bang for buck was probably to just get one of the PSP Vita models.
To be fair, this has a kind of synchronicity, since the original PSP was my first exposure to homebrew hardware modding.
IDK, either way, I'll probably eventually end up with an Anbernic device or something similar. They're just so neat and the idea of a tiny little Linux box with a built in gamepad appeals. But I can't help but think they could do better.
I didn't realize that the Anbernic thing was that close to GBA size, based on the appearance I expected something closer to the size of the Switch (entirely my own bias here).
But still, one of the things I liked about my GBA was how well it fit in the hand, part of that was because the back was somewhat contoured. The new trend of everything being flat rectangles makes devices a lot less comfy for me.
Nice! I can't find where I ordered mine from but I remember trying to go through the anberic website and it wouldn't successfully add things to my cart.
I found the Retro Game Corps YouTube channel to be a big help when getting everything setup.
I ended up modifying the behavior to hide everything on the launch screen except for 1-2 games I'm playing and made them always launch from save states on boot.
Just to confirm that I understand this correctly, that clear case is really 3D printed? I don't follow 3D printing too closely, but I did not think that something like this would be possible.
I've just been getting started with FDM printing since this summer, and after getting to know the limitations of my printer I'm even more amazed at the smoothness and resolution that some resin printers are getting. (I've even heard of people starting to print optical lenses[0], which I can hardly imagine.) You can really see the difference in resolution in the image with the different bottom shell!
I would have assumed some post-processing would be necessary to create a polished surface, but what really blows me away is that it's possible to make the entire interior void-free and consistently dense to create a transparent lens with no air bubbles or interior pockets. I can't even do that molding resin by hand.
I did not think so either, although, SLA is the one method I'd guess, if I had to, just going by the main picture. SLA is indeed the process they used, but what really surprised me was that it's offered as a 3D printing service from JLPCB and PCBWay.
Yeah this is definitely an SLA print. SLA is capable of amazing quality with respect to both dimensional tolerances and overall appearance of finished product.
I've been on the fence about getting one. This post might be the thing that pushes me over the edge.
I have an SLA printer (Prusa SL1) and rarely use it
Unless you get an industrial printer, dimensional accuracy gets messy with SLA. Slicers can try and compensate, but you end up having to work around warping
For organic shapes like figures I'm sure it's great, but as someone who prints functional items 99% of the time I'd rather tune an FDM printer than fight with my messy SLA machine
Tenths of a millimeter not much worse than FDM in vacuum... the problem is those tenths vary based on shape (even more than with FDM), and can be non-uniform across a surface (flat surfaces tend to end up warped pretty easily)
We had a form labs printer at work and while the resolution was great, it was very messy to deal with, parts were brittle, curing took a long time, support structure was annoying to remove (and very time consuming to remove traces of), and over weeks or months most parts with any significant feature longer in one dimension warped. I don’t think anyone used it once as soon as we got an FDM printer.
> and over weeks or months most parts with any significant feature longer in one dimension warped
That's alarming. How bad are we talking about, like millimeters or fractions thereof?
I really, really like the appearance of the case from TFA and would love to build similar enclosures for my projects, but if that comes at the expense of noticeable long term dimensional instability, no thanks.
In a 10cm part, could get someone 3mm of warping perpendicular to the longest dimension. Admittedly, this can be mitigated by adding ribs and being careful about curing, but between this, messiness and brittleness, it was just fussy compared to FDM printing.
This was already five years ago so I wouldn’t discount the technology altogether, I would just check for the printer and material you’re interested in.
Some people have talked about SLA. We have a Project MJP at work (https://www.3dsystems.com/3d-printers/plastic). It uses UV cured resins for its printing, it also prints in wax for the support structures, so you can just melt them away with an oil bath afterwards.
The quality of the results is excellent - you can print some really fine detailed parts. The downside is cost (print and the materials) and the fact that the materials involved are pretty nasty - they come with some major warnings about causing infertility and cancer just for coming into contact.
If the author's here, please note that the embedded pictures in the article are huge! Felt like I was on dial-up again, waiting for them to load on 2.4g WiFi.
He used FreeCAD?? That is the most amazing and shocking part of this for me. Every time I have ever tried to use that software something goes wrong only for hours later to find a forum post that Oh that doesn't work in FreeCAD currently.
Maybe I just have had a few bad experiences and I'm by no means a CAD expert, but that one is close to the top of my list and I have used 5/6 CAD programs over the last 15 years.
I love projects like this because I learn about new materials or gadgets. I'm filing them away slowly in my mind hoping to put together an Ex-Word clone in the future. I didn't know you could order flexible PCB, and now I do. I thought the hinges were perfect, too, but now I realize that the SP hinges don't also act as a power switch. I just love that the Ex-Word would switch on and off automatically when you open and close it.
Looking at my Ex-Word PCB again, I think it actually uses a Hall Effect sensor to detect when it's closed; I couldn't find a magnet that mates with it when the device is closed, but the frame is metal so maybe it just detects that? Hall effect sensors for clamshell devices appear to be industry standard (laptops, flip phones, etc.).
This is awesome. I miss hinges. The Switch is great, but I loved being able to throw my sp or ds into a bag or pocket without worrying about scratching it.
You can't even put the switch in its own dock without worrying about scratches. Considering that Nintendo has always been a company that makes good hardware the switch has been a huge disappointment. All the scratched screens, dead pixels, and joycon problems shouldn't have made it past the first batches sold.
I thought the dock scratching the screen was a hoax that was dispelled roughly at the same time it launched. My kids have been docking it very ungracefully for years and it’s not scratched.
screen protectors and other weird tricks like wrapping your switch in cloth or modifying the dock seem pretty common which probably helps make it less likely.
Now that folding-screen smartphones are a thing that actually exist on the market, it's not entirely impossible to imagine that the next Switch could be foldable like the SP. :P
Thank you for this detailed article. I don't have a Game boy (and don't intend to start). But man o man. Articles like this remind me of why I being a geek. Thanks.
The SP was pretty painful to hold and use for long times in my experience. The shoulder buttons were particularly hard to hit comfortably. The original GBA horizontal design is my favorite and most comfortable. Swap it to a nice backlit LCD or even OLED and it would be perfect.
GBA wasn't bad but it was bulkier to carry on your person. The portability of the SP was killer and the beautiful LCD screen was protected in your bag or pocket.
As far as ergonomics, it wasn't so bad. For more action oriented games, it could be a bit tiring, but for Pokemon it was the perfect machine.
Ds Lite imo is even better. Its thinner so it fits easier in the pocket even though its wider. You put in a flashcart with a 32gb micro sd and now you can store every game worth playing from the nds, gba, gbc, gb, snes, nes, sega genesis, various ataris and other early game systems. It has the longest battery life for a nintendo handheld I believe. Plus I find it pretty comfortable in adult hands still, definitely moreso than the nintendo switch.
Good point but I'd contend that the SP might have been more durable. I'm not sure. Either way, I liked the weight of it over the DS lite. Both great devices though.
I lived down the block from that NYU makerspace and walked my dog past it every day.
I'm also a self-taught dev who's wanted to go back to college and get a degree for posterity.
So naturally applying to NYU made sense, get started on the education stuff I was putting off, get access to a really cool makerspace, etc. I talked to someone from admissions at the school, learned more about the process, but then we got to pricing and the fact I wouldn't qualify for assistance... well it turned out it was practically unaffordable for me, a senior SWE in NYC making a "FAANG-like" salary.
I say "practically" because technically I could pay it, but to what end? I'd be looking at over 150k over the next two years for a simple bachelors with no appreciable change to my career trajectory.
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It really blew my mind. I was making what their graduates can expect to make years out of school and the math wasn't working, how is it supposed to work for someone coming out of high school?
The cynic in me would look at that makerspace that easily had *40k in Ultimakers that never actually seemed to be printing anything peeking out the window and think "is this what they're paying for?", but I guess on the flip side you get things like this post?
* Actually I went and looked at an old picture, I only counted 8 or so in view of the window...
What's the point of this, you can easily go to cheaper school and pay about 10K a year. Software Engineering is a fields where you don't even need a degree to be honest. I know at least 2 colleagues who make much more than me without degrees.
Just make side projects.
Or spend a bit more , go to UC Berkeley and you can attend one of the best CS schools in the world. Just live in California for a year to get residency first
That's my whole point, I don't have a degree and it's been a long time since that came up.
In my most recent position I got an offer before the recruiter found out I didn't have a degree: We were making small talk waiting for someone to join the call and they offhandedly asked where I went to school... I didn't.
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So with that in mind, how are they justifying their value over those cheaper (or free) options? With an expensive makerspace? Pedigree? (as you point out there are cheaper schools of a similar calibre)
To me it doesn't add up and something has to give at some point. I've long felt that if we get student loan relief, it must come with tightening the purse strings on the tuition side by downsizing how much the government is willing to finance per student.
The schools are using the money for everything from vanity projects to real-estate plays, that needs to stop.
For the most part you either should logically come from money or get a scholarship. At 18 your free to ruin your life in a variety of ways ,college isn't the worst.
They take out loans for it, and as the now-in-jeopardy relief program shows they often can't pay those loans back.
A lot of schools don't even have the prestige but have this pricing problem: if we keep letting colleges access "free money" on the backs of 18 year olds, they will keep taking that money and spending it regardless of if it benefits the students.
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If you walk into a bank as an assetless 18 year old and ask for a $100,000 for "a big bet that will probably pay off just trust me", you'll be politely but firmly asked to leave.
Why are we letting that happen just because some school offering 0 collateral happens to be the co-signer?
Most people aren't literally taking out a 100k loan.
It's a very complex problem. Not everyone wants to code, for many professions you really need to get into a top school. That top school might cost a bit of money.
Recently I've found it's best to worry about oneself to be frank.
Know you don't want to take out 100k for a top school, but don't judge those who do.
Assuming that results in an additional 5 to 10k in income per year after graduation, it easily pays for itself.
For you, since you already have an established career it makes little sense to spend that much
I didn't judge the students who go there, or imply such a thing.
My parents both came to this country from a third world country and spent the better parts of their lives working towards their doctorates, so I'm not looking down on people for seeking education.
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My entire point is that the act of paying tuition isn't what makes you 5-10k, going to the school as a whole is.
NYU is a school where according to their own numbers the average student does in fact pay out more than 100k for a 4 year degree after the >30k in aid the average student gets
And so I'm questioning if that extreme level of cost is actually a requisite of NYU creating a student worth more than average.
Do they really need to spend 1 billion dollars more a year than UC Berkley, on a slightly smaller student body, to make students who make near identical salaries?
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At the end of the day no one person can answer that, but I'm highly skeptical and would rather see downward pressure on tuition in the form for cutting off the money faucet that is 18 year olds taking out loans.
If the schools really generate equivalent value to what they're asking, that shouldn't be an issue: richer graduates will still benefit their endowments, better outcomes will still differentiate them, etc.
If I may ask... what specialization are you in? and is it the same thing you started off in? I've been thinking of pivoting and have narrowed it down to 1-3 niches, but also don't have a degree but currently working in a FAANG company.
My first paid programming gigs were on video games as a freelance Unity developer, but my "real career" was founded on embedded Android
Embedded systems were a good match for my background tinkering with assembly for calculators and messing with MCUs, but it's a very "traditional" part of tech.
Android in embedded is much closer to mobile in terms of culture, so my lack of a degree wasn't a problem getting started, and demand has only grown over the years. I currently work in HMI for self-driving vehicles these days but I've worked on everything from in-store interactive displays to prototype fitness equipment
Bonus: You can also pivot to traditional mobile dev, which I've done for some stints over the course of my career
Take a look through the window during orientation time. all those machines will be running printing out crap to show how cool and trendy their maker space is.
> Another thing I learned about myself: I kinda like being old. I recently turned 41 and sure, my back hurts all the time and I’m going grey, but I have enough experience and domain knowledge at this point that picking up CAD and PCB design over the summer isn’t that big a deal. It feels nice to reap the rewards of all of my experience.
That's how you tell the professionals from the novices! The professionals only get it wrong once. Per connector, of course. The novices can get it wrong up to five times, which is really impressive! (The novice in question may or may not have been me.)