Incredible Mod Turns the Game Boy Advance Into a Mini Switch With Joy-Con and Dock Support

Modding the 18-year-old Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP with upgrades like a greater display and greater battery is comparatively painless. But modding the GBA SP in order that it features as a devoted 16-bit Switch with Joy-Con and TV-out help? That’s a monumental problem that Macho Nacho Productions in some way made look straightforward.

Among devoted GBA SP followers who’ve caught with the console for nearly twenty years now, Macho Nacho Productions might be greatest identified for its promised improve equipment that provides trendy facilities to the console like a bigger battery, wi-fi charging, a headphone jack, and Bluetooth help for wi-fi audio streaming. The concept is to take a basic console and convey it in control with extra trendy handhelds, however what if somebody did the reverse and took a contemporary handheld and swapped out 3D high-def gaming for retro 16-bit graphics? Is the world prepared for the GBA Switch?

There are already display improve kits out there for the GBA SP that flip the handheld’s link port into a video-out connection for connecting it to a TV and taking part in basic GBA titles on a a lot greater display. Using that as a place to begin, Tito from Macho Nacho Productions and Kyle Brinkerhoff nonetheless needed to develop a customized 3D-printed rear housing alternative that included rails for a pair of Joy-Cons to connect to plus sufficient house for a customized PCB and Raspberry Pi Zero in order that the Joy-Cons may wirelessly management the GBA gameplay. On high of that, they wanted to squeeze a bigger 2,000 mAh battery in there too to energy the entire extra electronics.

The outcomes are now not a GBA SP that may be slipped right into a pocket, so the duo even created a customized Switch-like dock the modded handheld may be saved wherein additionally makes it straightforward to attach it to a tv set. Brinkerhoff has included the entire information you’ll want on their GitHub page for anybody eager to deal with this improve themselves, together with a hyperlink the place you should buy the custom PCB board.

Just don’t anticipate the mod’s performance to be as clean as it’s with the true Nintendo Switch. Wirelessly pairing the Joy-Cons is a prolonged course of that entails connecting the Raspberry Pi to a pc and operating customized code, and that has to occur each single time the GBA Switch is powered on. It appears to be like like an actual ache, and that alone is perhaps sufficient to justify shelling out for the Nintendo Switch Online service, cross your fingers that in the future Nintendo provides the GBA to the listing of supported retro consoles.