Sebastian Staacks is a coder and good old style tinkerer, whose weblog There Oughta Be is rammed with technical curiosities from LED cubes to an automatic irrigation system for his garden. Now Staacks has upped the nostalgia ante significantly with, first, the creation of a WiFi Sport Boy cartridge and, now, managing to get Grand Theft Auto 5 and Doom working on Nintendo’s traditional {hardware}.
“Just a few weeks in the past I created a Sport Boy cartridge with built-in WiFi,” writes Staacks. “Now I taught it to stream video and play video games—in full decision. At 20 fps. On an unmodified authentic Sport Boy.”
Staacks has a technical writeup of how he did it here, and an easier video explainer, in which you’ll see the sport working on the {hardware}. It clearly appears to be like like precisely what it’s: An all-singing, all-dancing technical showcase working on 1989 {hardware} that, even at launch, was being unfairly derided as out of date. In different phrases, absolute magic.
The video under begins when Staacks is showcasing recreation demos on the gadget.
The unique Sport Boy display screen is clearly not splendid for this activity, significantly in the case of distinction. One more reason to be jealous of Staacks is that he is received his arms on a Pocket, which has an unbelievable display screen, and under exhibits what the WiFi cart’s trickery appears to be like like on that show.
My WiFI cartridge on the @analogue Pocket.It really works immediately, however with a small timing downside: These horizontal glitches are usually not current on the unique #gameboy. Nonetheless, I’m very impressed that the Pocket is so near the unique.https://t.co/tBC05jGYBP pic.twitter.com/sU9B2BikO2January 15, 2022
Grand Theft Auto 5 is clearly the spotlight right here as a result of, nicely, wow. Staacks’ WiFi cart got here with directions for others to construct their very own, and considered one of his followers naturally reached for the perennial favorite that’s Doom.
“With this new demo,” writes Staacks, “many different demos nearly turn into out of date. I can show something and I can management something that may be displayed on and managed by my PC. After all, the interface and picture are nearly unusable this manner, so some devoted implementations would possibly nonetheless be attention-grabbing. And likewise, I didn’t contact audio right here, which sadly was an enormous oversight by me when designing this cartridge.”
Schematics, supply code and detailed explanations can be found here.
