You Can Play Grand Theft Auto V on the Game Boy Using This Clever Cartridge

Although the previous top-down model of Grand Theft Auto was at one time ported to the Game Boy Color, the expertise was nowhere close to as enjoyable because the infamous 3D variations of the sport, so Sebastian Staacks determined to repair that and has give you a strategy to truly play Grand Theft Auto V on the unique Game Boy by way of the magic of sport streaming.

As our numerous gadgets acquire velocity in accessing the web quickly will increase by way of applied sciences like 5G and the not too long ago demonstrated wifi 7, it appears inevitable that downloading big online game installs or shopping for bodily cartridges and discs will quickly be a factor of the previous. Streaming will undoubtedly be the actual way forward for gaming, the place titles run on highly effective cloud servers whereas video of the gameplay is transmitted to gamers, precisely how companies like Google Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming work—and there’s no extra convincing demonstration of the true potential of sport streaming than what Sebastian Staacks has come up with for his or her newest demo.

The final time we checked in with Staacks, they have been demonstrating an unique Game Boy streaming Star Wars. And whereas the film has by no means seemed worse than when it was compressed to 160 x 144 pixels working at 20 frames per second in 4 shades of grey, it was nonetheless a neat accomplishment. The secret behind the Game Boy’s newfound streaming capabilities was a customized cartridge Staacks designed and constructed round a wi-fi ESP8266 microchip and a customized PCB squeezed inside a Game Boy cartridge shell.

But Staacks is way from accomplished with their customized Game Boy cartridge, and in a follow-up video and a new post on their personal blog, they share not solely extra particulars concerning the challenges of displaying full-screen video on the Game Boy’s display which is proscribed to a tile-based rendering system, but additionally some new methods added to the cartridge. Not solely can it now be used to stream gameplay footage in real-time, however the Game Boy can be used to truly play titles like GTA V utilizing its personal controls.

The expertise doesn’t come anyplace near taking part in Grand Theft Auto V on a PlayStation console, clearly. Not solely will the Game Boy’s display nonetheless burn your retinas, however the handheld lacks all of the buttons and analog joysticks that assist make 3D video games really feel so interactive. But the truth that you can is what makes this hack so spectacular, and whereas Staacks has made the entire project open source for these wanting to try to construct their very own wi-fi cartridge, we’re going to stay hopeful that somebody decides to construct and promote these en masse for the remainder of us.