Do you like Nintendo games? How about handhelds? Do you prefer the now-venerable Game Boy Advance (GBA) to more modern platforms, but wish your aging eyes could enjoy its content on a large CRT instead of a dinky LCD? If you answered yes to all those questions, you are exactly the type of person [GouldFish on Games] made this custom console for, and you should probably be friends.
The external appearance of this hack is slick: a 3D printed console with the contours of the GBA in that iconic purple, but with a cartridge bay door like an NES and a SNES controller port. It’s the GBA console Nintendo never made, sitting next to a period-appropriate CRT. Playing GBA game on a CRT with an SNES controller is already hacky; what makes it really hacky is the guts are yet another Nintendo system — the DS Lite.
Why a DS Lite? Two reasons: one, it is cheaper to get a busted DS Lite than an old GBA mainboard. Two, as we covered before, the DS Lite can do composite-out with a relatively cheap add-on board. [GouldFish] really is hacking on the shoulders of giants, and they acknowledge it in the video. Aside from the composite-out board, he also makes use of community knowledge on how to make the DS Lite boot without screens or batteries.
Should you be interested in putting your own version of this console together, [GouldFish] was kind enough to share the STLs for the 3D printed enclosure, as well as the Gerber files for the custom PCB that interfaces with the SNES controller port.
We featured a CRT mod for an original Game Boy before, but this seems a lot more practical, if a lot less portable. [GouldFish] has no shortage of old titles and newer homebrew to chose from for this console, but they could always use more. We once featured a primer on how to get into the GBA homebrew scene, if you want to make a game.
Thanks to [Kris] for the tip.
What could be cool for a future revision would be to use pogo pins to make the interconnects between the boards, so they line up and make contact as the case is closed.
This is what I call poetry.
Very cool BUT the GBA Consolizer is old hat. There are hacks to make every non-portable console portable and ever portable console non-portable so at this point I want to see console rebuilds that use the original ICs but have newly engineered PCBs that have superior options like HDMI output.
Yes, I know that I’m spoiled and it is sad.
I’m not sure if HDMI is being recommended, even.
The GBA was a portable SNES and most games had used pixel art.
I mean, sure, that pixel art was meant for an LCD screen unlike real SNES pixel art (which used dithering etc).
But anyhow, such low-res graphics look better on a blurry screen.
Having ass-big pixels on a 48″ 4K HDMI monitor isn’t pretty, at all.
The GBA had a tiny screen, by comparison, which made everything look more detailed despite the low resolution.
A 14″ CRT TV with composite input is the better option, I think.
If you can’t get it, you’re better off with an emulator that offers filters.
Hmm, well, maybe the solution is a retro gaming blurrifier overlay for the big LCD. Maybe there’s a suitable diffusion layer available to be stripped out of some dead LCD TV’s, or some sort of lighting diffuser from photography/cinematography.
:-)
In principle, the idea isn’t wrong as a solution.
But in practice, it needs a bit more than this.
Simulating a CRT screen mask (shadow mask, aperture grille) would be good.
It makes the picture more organic, more natural looking.
In the future, CRT simulator boxes might be hopefully available.
Converters/scalers which simulate a CRT, the beam and the glow of an old TV set.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_grille
Except I had a 13″ Sony Trinitron and then an Apple II monitor for a TV. Yes I was spoiled, yes most other TVs looked like hot garbage in comparison.
You wanted to be pr0 but actually appeared like total n00b. In 2009 I had Dell P1130 21″ Trinitron which is one of the best monitors ever made, period. I guess your parents were too poor to afford one XD
I had some designs for one that I was working on but never got to prototype.
My main issues were figuring out a good way to have USB-C with video (USB is complicated, video is complicated and the FPGA I wanted to use to keep price down would not be able to handle displayport output) and just being broke so buying prototypes fell off.
Furthest I got was video capture to VGA with actual hardware but the designs for more were sketched up.