A brick-sized Game Boy Advance SP

gameboy

For a few years now, [Michael] has wanted to put the guts of a Game Boy Advance – the small clamshell version with a backlit LCD – into the classic and comfortable DMG-01 ‘brick’ Game Boy. He’s finally finished with his project, and we’ve got to say it’s looking pretty good.

The build began by excising the backlit LCD from an old clamshell Game Boy Advance and hot gluing it to the screen bezel of an old DMG-01. The cartridge slot from the original ‘brick’ Game Boy remained, but this design decision did require a fair bit of soldering and a length of ribbon cable.

Since [Michael] is using the original cartridge slot found in the original Game Boy, he can’t play any games in the smaller Game Boy Advance cartridge format. Still, it should be possible to build an adapter to fit those smaller cartridges inside the larger Game Boy, and he can always play Tetris and Little Sound DJ, so nothing of value is lost.

Comments

  1. mk2soldier says:

    Great stuff!

  2. 0xHF says:

    Awesome!!

  3. gabe says:

    since i got my advance SP a long time ago, i had a plastic handle that attached to the back and made it as comfortable as Playstation controller.

    too bad all i used it for was to play GBC games… and the screen was not much better.

  4. muriani says:

    Doesn’t work as a normal GBA (missing L/R buttons, cart slot permanently in GB mode, no screen widening) but it’s a FANTASTIC backlit GBC!
    …which is all he wanted anyway :P

    This looks really good. I kinda want to grab a used DMG01 and SP at my local shop and try this myself.

  5. strider_mt2k says:

    It’s a dream many of us have had, realized at last.
    Cool!!

  6. Vincent says:

    well made, such simple looking, yet very challenging!! Very good!

  7. Marvin says:

    Why don’t people use finer pitched ribbon cable like the last IDE cables? Because the are more prone to break off (since they are single stranded)?

    Or doesn’t ist simply occur to them?

    If he fixes everything with hot glue this wouldn’t be an issue…

  8. Blue Footed Booby says:

    Wait, so he went out of his way to use the original GB cart slot, and didn’t include triggers. So basically this is just a backlit GBC? How odd.

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