Turns Out the Nintendo Game Boy Is the Worst Way to Watch Movies

Video recreation consoles have advanced into multi-purpose leisure hubs, letting players stream films, chat with associates, and do excess of simply play video games. The 32-year-old Nintendo Game Boy, by comparability, was strictly a recreation machine—a minimum of till Sebastian Staacks discovered a solution to expand its capabilities, together with turning it into the worst attainable way to watch movies.

If your gaming pedigree dates again to Nintendo’s earlier handheld consoles, you in all probability do not forget that the colour display screen Game Boy Advance might really be used to observe TV reveals by particular cartridges containing episodes of reveals like Spongebob Squarepants, or full films just like the Shrek movies. The picture high quality was downright terrible, restricted to resolutions of 240 x 160 for animated TV reveals and even much less for longer films, however it was nonetheless significantly higher than the Frankenstein’s monster of a media participant that Staacks has created.

The Game Boy was powered by a Sharp LR35902 processor working at simply 4.19 MHz (for comparability, the velocity of processors in trendy smartphones at the moment are measured in GHz), which implies that it merely doesn’t have the horsepower wanted to decode and show compressed video information in actual time. So how did Staacks get Star Wars enjoying on that ugly four-color grayscale display screen?

Last month Staacks shared a post on their personal blog detailing how they efficiently constructed a wifi Game Boy cartridge that relied on a wi-fi ESP8266 microchip along with a number of different elements hooked up to a customized PCB. The cartridge’s capabilities are severely restricted by the Game Boy’s processor (you possibly can’t use it to obtain playable ROM information from a cloud server, for instance), however Staack’s earliest demonstrations embrace utilizing telnet to ship and obtain easy textual content messages, and utilizing a primary on-screen keyboard to entry and display Wikipedia articles. As spectacular as it’s to see a Game Boy with wi-fi web entry, accessing Wikipedia isn’t terribly thrilling, so Staack got here up with one other use for the wi-fi cartridge that’s way more attention-grabbing.

Staack has promised a for much longer video explaining all the small print at a later time, however on Twitter last week they shared a short video of an unique unmodified Game Boy utilizing the customized wifi cartridge to stream Star Wars compressed to simply 160 x 144 pixels and working at 20 frames per second—a limitation that Staack explains is a results of the “short intervals at which the Game Boy allows access to the video RAM.” Watching streamed video on the Game Boy’s display screen is an terrible expertise, significantly given how cropped a film must be to suit on its sq. display screen, however the truth that it can be completed is form of superior. Just don’t anticipate a Netflix or Disney+ app for the Game Boy anytime quickly (or ever).

If you need to attempt constructing considered one of these wifi cartridges your self, Staack has supplied pretty detailed directions on their personal blog, and the open supply plans and information available for download on their GitHub page. You’ll must be very comfy with electronics, programming, and soldering to construct your personal, however as extra individuals begin tinkering with this {hardware}, will probably be attention-grabbing to see what else the 30-year-old Game Boy can do with web entry.