Do you remember when it came out GTA V? We were all excited, wanting to play it after so many years of waiting. Quite the opposite of now, that we curse Rockstar Games every time it takes the game to a new platformas is the case with PlayStation 5. But… What if we brought GTA V to a console of the past? Something like this has achieved modder of consoles of the moment, which has managed to handle Michael De Santa himself in his 1989 8 bit console. And no, it has not been easy.
GTA V on a Game Boy thanks to the power of streaming
The youtuber There Oughta Be He already surprised us at the end of December with his latest experiment, which many called an atrocity. The modder got turn your classic game boy into a streaming device. He did not touch a single circuit of the Nintendo console. Instead, he created a cartucho from scratch with Wi-Fi functions, and that it simply received input from a computer. Thus, a video went viral in which she reproduced A new hopeshowing a sequence in which we saw C3PO and R2-D2 with very poor quality, but showing that the Game Boy was capable of doing it despite the years.
At the end of the original video, the youtuber, named Sebastian Staacks, promised that this would be the first of several videos. His goal now went a little further. He was not content with the console receiving the streamingbut was looking for us to be able interact with playbackthat is, being able to send a video game and enter the real time commandsas is the case with Stadia, GeForce Now or even Parsec, which would be the most similar case, since it is an app that allows us to stream games between devices that we have at home.
New hardware limitations
Already with the Star Wars movie, Staacks had it difficult, but when playing streaming of video games, things have gotten even more uphill. The Game Boy screen is made up of ’tiles’, which we could translate as ‘boxes’. Altogether, the array has 360 squares —not pixels—, and here we find the first problem. The Game Boy is only capable of controlling 256 of the 360 squares on the screen at the same time.. In most games of its time, the developers always left blank holes for this very reason. In order to solve it, he had to resort to a trick used by almost everyone modderswhich is to use two tile maps and have the CPU switch from one to the other quickly, giving the illusion that everything is playing at the same time.
Another problem that was found wasthe data flow. The console would receive a flow of 169 kilobytes per second, which is an outrage for the Game Boy. In the video, Staacks elaborates on how he solved it, but his explanation is somewhat complex for mere mortals who don’t know programming.
GTA, doom, crisis and even YouTube on the original Game Boy
Finally, the youtuber dedicates the end of the video to playing the suggestions of the community on his console. GTA V, doom or crisis are some of the most curious suggestions that they propose. Laptop buttons are now functionaland send the order to the computer, which is dedicated to process the content and return the multimedia signal to the console nintendo pocket .
