If you thought that your old Nintendo Game Boy only served to make you nostalgic (and see how badly you two have aged when you get with it) now you can give it new life. At least, if you are a genius of hardware as Sebastian Staacks, physicist, programmer and creator of amazing things like the one we show you today.
A cartridge for the Nintendo Game Boy that allows you to connect it to the Internet via WiFi.
How to connect your Game Boy to the Internet and read Wikipedia
Specifically, it is a basic 32kB Game Boy cartridge with an ESP8266 microcontroller to add Wifi capabilities. With this, you can access data from the Internet or your local network on the Game Boy, or send data from the console to any other device that can communicate.
Here you have a rendering of the WiFi cartridge PCB. Once in the Game Boy, it can go online and do a few things, pre-programmed into the device. If you want to see it in action, do not hesitate to take a look at the video that we have put up for you.
Before we get too excited, clarify that this cartridge does not allow to play your old online games, nor can you access your ROM library over the network.
Playing online would only be possible if the games were modified significantly, because they have no idea what a network is, or how to manage their lag or how even internet access works. They were other simpler times when they were created.
So what makes it possible to do what Sebastian Staacks has achieved? Well very basic communication via network in text format, for example, using the veteran Telnet protocol. That is to say, bareback and without security, encryption or anything like that, which is how current communications of this type are handled.
However, that hasn’t stopped, within the cartridge it has built, Staacks, from implementing two demos to show what your invention can do.
One of them is a simple communication demonstration that allows connect to the cartridge via Telnet and send and receive text messages.
The second, much more curious, is a Wikipedia client, which allows you to enter the title of an article and get the “extract” of that article and display it on the screen of the Game Boy.
As you can see in the images, it may not be the best way to read the encyclopedia, but it is amazing that a Game Boy can connect to the Internet, and wirelessly.
Staack himself is working on more demos. Given that type of protocol, in theory you can do anything that means viewing text on the screen, such as a very basic browser for Reddit or Twitter.
Undoubtedly, the ingenuity of some gets out of hand and, if you are a handyman yourself, on the Staack website you have how he has done it. In the meantime, I’ll keep waiting for someone to build the same with a Spectrum, to dig up mine.
