Making a Recreation Boy Far Much less Transportable

One of many Nintendo Swap’s strongest promoting factors is that it’s each a conveyable handheld system and a house console. Not solely does that imply that you could transfer seamlessly from taking part in a recreation in your TV to taking part in on the go, it additionally means that you could play your favourite “transportable” video games on the large display. You are able to do the identical with older Recreation Boy video games by way of an emulator, however what if you wish to play on actual {hardware}? This information will stroll you thru tips on how to flip a Recreation Boy into a house console.

Earlier than you get indignant and depart a strongly worded remark, you need to know that the Recreation Boy used for this venture was already broken and had a nonfunctional display. The donor NES, which acts because the console enclosure, was additionally outdated and broken. On this venture, accomplished by Andy at element14, the 2 units are crammed collectively to type a brand new console. It accepts Recreation Boy cartridges, however outputs the video by way of HDMI to trendy TVs. You’ll play video games utilizing an NES controller. You’ll be able to even swap video coloration palettes.

Andy will stroll you thru the conversion course of intimately within the video, however we’ll cowl the highlights right here. You might want to faucet into the Recreation Boy’s motherboard via a pin header. That provides you entry to each video and controller inputs. A Raspberry Pi Pico board reads the video sign pins and outputs the video as VGA with the chosen coloration palette. An off-the-shelf VGA-to-HDMI converter completes the video output. The Pico additionally reads inputs from the NES controller and passes these on to the Recreation Boy’s motherboard pin header.