There are a variety of ways that you can get footage from a Game Boy game up onto a big screen. An emulator can easily step in to do the job or a modern-day variant like the Analogue Pocket might be more up your street with its HDMI output. But what if you wanted to stream from an original Game Boy, and an unmodded one at that?
That is the question that was asked of Sebastian Staacks (@diconx), a tech wiz who was tasked with achieving this very feat for a Tetris tournament in which the competitors need to use their own, original consoles (muscle memory and all that). His solution? The GB Interceptor.
Staack's device bypasses all of the problems that one would normally find with such a conundrum by taking the console's game data and transferring it to another device via the Game Boy's cartridge slot. The GB Interceptor works by simultaneously emulating the Game Boy's and the CPU's functions. All of the precise detail that went into the build can be found in Staack's recent blog post, where the designer breaks down his building process and some of the issues with the design.
If technical terminology isn't in your wheelhouse however (join the club), then the designer has also put together a video which shows the device in action and gives a brief rundown of how it came to be. Is it still an extremely complex process? Absolutely. But the visuals go a long way to showing how Staack broke down the problem and settled on his final product. We have attached the full video to the bottom of this article for you to check out.
The question is, how can we get our hands on one of these devices ourselves? Unfortunately, Staack does not build the product for retail, although he has put together a step-by-step guild on exactly how you can build one for yourself. In the tutorial video, the designer breaks down all of the parts and materials that you will need to order before showing you the exact process of the build - hey, a little DIY never hurt anyone!
While it might take a little effort, we have to admit that the GB Interceptor looks pretty darn neat. Now to get Pokémon Red and Blue on the TV...
What do you make of this device? Stream your thoughts in the comments below!
[source there.oughta.be, via twitter.com]
Comments 11
It's a typical solution for a problem that do not exist.
You can stream gameboy games without hacking or modding, using OG hardware (super game boy). People are doing that for ages now.
@abdias Or a Game Boy Player, which runs GB games more accurately and also can run GBC and GBA games.
@abdias This was made because the competitors needed to use their own original Gameboy consoles
@MinionsBanana @abdias
This is true, official console methods of playing Game Boy / Color / Advance games have existed for a long time, and will be readily more convenient than this nifty GB Interceptor device.
I think this speaks to the ingenuity to make such a device in the first place.
There's a couple of things worth pointing about about the Super Game Boy and the Game Boy Player however.
The original Super Game Boy notoriously runs at a slightly faster frequency than the handheld Game Boy hardware.
It runs at 4.295 MHz based on the SNES's own oscillator, so Game Boy program and audio runs 2.4% faster than it should.
Exclusive to Japan, a Super Game Boy 2 was released that fixes the issue and runs Game Boy games at the correct 4.194 MHz frequency.
As for the Game Boy Player, the original software provided by Nintendo is notorious for its poor video output.
A homebrew solution to run the Game Boy Player hardware using alternative software called Game Boy Interface exists, but it is not as readily accessible to many people.
Nintendo life did an article covering this in a little detail.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/10/random-turns-out-you-can-make-the-gamecubes-game-boy-player-a-lot-better
This is all about choices. I sometimes play a DS and way prefer the buttons and Control Pad of the original DS, but the screen is not very bright. The DS Lite is quiet to operate but feels spongy to me, but the screen is brighter.
Original hardware does have its place and it's cool original Game Boy can output to a TV.
Hopefully they’ll put gameboy games on switch soon
This is awesome but I'm not in a position to produce it myself, too bad... I think it would be a good way to extract / make decent copies of GameBoy Camera photos...
Pretty cool. Not something I would buy but, it's cool for sure.
hm nice asking for a gba for christmas
Shut up and take my money
@RupeeClock Hey! I remember you! You were the guy that called the AV Famicom by the name of "top loader"! Good to see that today you did your research.
And as you said right, the Super Gameboy 2 is more accurate, your research failed when you missed the part that people don't like most on the Super Gameboy that is not the clockspeed but the aspect ratio.
The gameboy player on other hand is flawless, maybe your favorite youtuber or tiktoker said otherwise to harvest clicks, but it is flawless. GBI generates a sharper look, but it is obvious that Nintendo did not went on that route because was developing a software for CRTs and not for digital-out-hdmi-plus-upscaler-plus-elgato-pluswhatever. If you don't have all that junk plugged on your gamecube you will never ever notice a GBI superiority (specially for the OG gameboy games).
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