By day, Sebastian Staacks is a trained Physicist. By night, he is a tinkerer, making cool gadgets and doing really cool projects, all of which are fully documented and open-sourced in his blog There Oughta Be.
Recently, he delved into the world of retro gaming, sparked by finding his beloved childhood Game Boy in his parents attic. Of course, like any rational person, he thought, why don’t I add wifi to this three decades old console? And so, he set out to do just that!
He documented the entire project in an extremely well produced video:
And then, as a follow up to the initial wifi cartridge project, Sebastian added the ability to stream video wirelessly directly to the Game Boy as shown in this tweet:
Here is how I stream video and even play GTA5 on my unmodified #gameboy.
Video: https://t.co/Gai3pasEJm
Blog: https://t.co/9YrKTwmgSu#nintendo #retrogaming— Sebastian Staacks (@diconx) January 13, 2022
He then published another very informative video to his YouTube channel covering all the inner workings of this added capability. But, he didn’t stop there. Sebastian went the extra mile and made the Game Boy an input device allowing it to control games being played on a PC. He demonstrated Grand Theft Auto V being played through the Game Boy, with the video feed being wirelessly transmitted to the Game Boy’s LCD and being controlled by the Game Boy’s D-Pad and face buttons:
This is an incredible project that truly opens the door to a ton of really awesome possibilities. In my video, Sebastian discusses some of these possibilities, highlighting potential new and innovative ways to develop games for the Game Boy that would never have been possible on original hardware alone.
I very much look forward to Sebastian’s future work as well as what other people do with this amazing project.
