The Game Boy Test Lab Provides A Cartridge-Sized Diagnostic Lab

October 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Most of the time when you see a repair video of a Game Boy it’ll be demonstrated with a cartridge inserted and booting up into the game, but does this actually mean that the system is truely fully functional? There can still be more intermittent faults, dodgy buttons, or even something like a defective link port — all of which can be much harder to detect than firing up a copy of Tetris. This is where the GB Test Lab cartridge by [Marcel Pflug] of the Game Boy Museum comes into play.

With the freely available ROM put on an EverDrive or similar flash cartridge, you can test a whole range of functions of the original Game Boy (DMG-01), most of them autonomously and some with some user input.

This is similar to the test cartridge that Nintendo themselves used in the form of the DMG-AGING-01, which validated the basic functionality of the handheld. Since then a myriad of test cartridges have been created by the homebrew community, but not all try to test quite literally everything possible. In the case of the GB Test Lab this includes the typical like CPU, RAM, interrupts, etc., but also key bounce time, intermittent connectivity and playing a game of Pong between two GBs connected by link cable as well as using the GB Printer.

Results are saved per GB and persisted if the flash cartridge has battery backup or similar. Overall it seems quite comprehensive and something that’s worth giving a shot if you’re the kind of person who owns one or more GBs. Perhaps the neatest part of this ROM is that it also contains a built-in reference for all the components and other useful details, including how to interpret results and symptoms.

An Enhanced Game Boy Advance

September 17, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 14 Comments

[Bucket Mouse] has long been a fan of the various iterations of the Nintendo Game Boy. Now, he’s turned his eye to the Game Boy Advance, building an enhanced version for the console’s 25th anniversary.

There are plenty of ways to mod an existing GBA to be better than the original, but this build recreates the console from the ground up. It’s basically a brand new motherboard that replaces the original entirely, requiring only the CPU and RAM to be harvested from the original board.

It’s perfect for when you find a badly-damaged handheld that needs heavy repair, because every other part on the board can be purchased new. You can buy a nice shiny screen kit online, and even upgrade to LiPo power if so desired. The new motherboard also eliminates sound issues that are common when upgrading the screen in a classic GBA, and there’s stereo audio available on the headphone jack as standard. Battery life is also improved compared to the original.

If you’ve got a haggard old GBA in need of repair, or you just want to build the best classic handheld you can, it’s worth taking a look at this build. You might also appreciate previous works from [Bucket Mouse], like his efforts to improve the original Game Boy.

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Building A Headless Game Boy Emulator

August 28, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 6 Comments

[Artificial-Age] has built a rather unique way to play old Game Boy games. It’s an emulator, but it doesn’t work in quite the way you might think!

Since the Game Boy is a relatively simple 8-bit machine that runs at a leisurely 4 MHz or so, it is well within the capabilities of an ESP32 microcontroller to emulate. [Artificial-Age] got an ESP32-S3 and programmed it to do just that. However, there’s a twist—there is no screen hooked up to the microcontroller, nor any buttons. Instead, the board is accessed over a WiFi access point that it hosts itself.

One then opens a web browser, which streams the emulated video and audio from the console, while accepting button inputs from your keyboard or touchscreen, depending on the platform you’re viewing the web interface on. ROMs are stored on the ESP32’s flash storage, and can be uploaded via the web interface.

It’s an interesting setup, and one that perhaps doesn’t make obvious sense at first. After all, any modern smartphone can easily emulate a Game Boy, too. However, this setup makes it easy to share the emulator with other people, who can simply check out the WiFi AP and web interface without having to download or or install anything on their own device. We’ve featured some other fun emulation projects lately, too.

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At Last, A Gameboy Advance With Decent Audio

August 24, 2026 by Jenny List 2 Comments

Many pieces of consumer electronics are build down to a price, and the corners cut show up in their performance. The Gameboy Advance from Nintendo is no exception: its audio is a PWM stream that sounds awful through the included amplifier. [Cajun Panda] has a fix though, in the form of a replacement audio chain.

It takes the form of a PCB that hooks into the pads of the removed GBA audio chip, and provides a much cleaner audio path with filtering and EQ and a class D audio amplifier. In addition there’s an audio codec and an ESP32 for Bluetooth connectivity, enabled by a long press of a GBA button and configured via a web interface on the ESP. Best of all there is no case modification, this is designed to remain as stock as possible.

Everything can be found in a GitHub repository should you wish to make your own, so if you want to bring your GBA audio up to scratch you know where to go. If you want to make it even better don’t forget, you can always upgrade the screen.

Turning A Toy Game Boy Into A Real Game Boy

August 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

In the world of children’s toys there are many offerings which are meant to look like devices used by older kids or even adults, with the Fisher Price Laugh & Learn Lil’ Gamer toy bearing quite the resemblance to Nintendo’s iconic Game Boy. Although this factoid could be filed away as amusing trivia before passing said toy to a child for its requisite physical abuse by said child, a purported adult can still have a lot of fun with this toy by modding it into a real Game Boy, as [KOUZEX] recently did.

Part of the challenge here is to not just treat it as an unconventional replacement shell for a genuine Game Boy, but to retain as much of the child toy’s look and feel as possible. This includes things like buttons and even the weird sliding blocks on the side.

For the functional components a Game Boy Color with a busted screen was chosen as a donor, with the GBC mainboard fitting almost perfectly inside its new shell. Wires were then soldered to bridge Nintendo’s PCB with the toy’s PCB to make the original buttons and speaker work. After blowing a fuse on the GBC mainboard due to likely some power back feeding, the toy’s PCB had its non-essential parts stripped, but fortunately without further damage to the grafted in electronics.

Most of this mod is quite straightforward, just with some creativity required to add a Select and Start button as these were notably absent from the original. The new, rather large replacement OLED screen is a nice upgrade too and actually fits pretty well with the chunky look of the child’s toy. Even as mostly a joke mod, it seems surprisingly functional.

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Watch YouTube On A Game Boy Color With A Special Cartridge

June 26, 2026 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

There’s no questioning [Throaty Mumbo]’s uncanny skill at answering questions that nobody ever asked, such as whether it’s possible to watch YouTube videos on a Nintendo Game Boy Color handheld gaming system.

Of course the answer here is a resounding ‘sorta’, loosely defined by what you mean with ‘watch’ and ‘video’ exactly. For the impatient there’s the GitHub project page with the project summary, along with a detailed video containing hijinks and a playback demo on real Game Boy Color hardware with the cobbled-together GBCTube cartridge.

The nice thing about these cartridge-based gaming systems is that you get direct access to the system’s hardware via the cartridge bus, with for systems like the GBC a basic cartridge PCB readily available if you’re feeling that prototyping itch.

Such a cartridge breakout board for the GBC was thus used as the core of this project, with an ESP32-C6 acting solely as Wi-Fi bridge for the RP2350B MCU which handles basic player firmware and bridging duty between the GBC and the streamed video data from the host PC. It’s the latter does the heavy lifting of wrangling the YouTube experience into something that sort of works on the GBC’s amazing, very vibrant, backlight-free 160×144 resolution color LCD.

With the cartridge inserted you can search for a video title on the GBC, select a video which is then downloaded with yt-dlp on the host PC and prepared for streaming. Audio is handled by the RP2350B to free up CPU cycles on the GBC, for which a separate speaker is slapped into the cartridge for high-fidelity mostly-synced audio.

Perhaps the most fascinating question that one is left with is whether a more powerful Espressif MCU like e.g. the ESP32-S31 could combine all these tasks into a single package. Not because there’s a particular reason to do so, but more out of sheer morbid curiosity, perhaps.

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Fixing A Nintendo Game Boy Clone That Runs Too Fast

June 4, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

There’s no shortage of cloned Nintendo hardware out there, and most of it is pretty poor. A few are actually pretty interesting though, such as the GB Boy by Gangfeng, which takes real cartridges and thus in many ways should provide the original Game Boy Pocket experience with modern hardware. But as you might imagine, even the best of the clones comes with various technical issues at no additional charge — with this particular unit having a habit of running the game too fast. It’s an issue that [Sharopolis] addresses in a recent video with a partial fix.

As can be seen in the demonstration, it runs games just too fast to make it very usable or fun, hence why it sat in a drawer for a few years after purchasing off AliExpress. This raises the question of what’s wrong with these units, as others report similar issues with this and other ‘GB Boy’ variants.

Fortunately the unit is easy to open, revealing the PCB with a couple of chips on it, one marked KF2001 being the brains of the operation alongside two memory chips. The crystal resonator marked X1 for the main IC is rated for 5 MHz, whereas a quick look inside the Game Boy Pocket shows that its crystal resonator runs at 4.1943 MHz, which is a bit of a difference.

Because of how buying components and pricing works, [Sharopolis] ended up with a reel of 100 of replacement resonators with the right parameters for a drop-in replacement. After swapping the resonator, the GB Boy now does indeed run games at the right speed, but a new issue has now cropped up in the form of flicker on the display.

In the comments it’s suggested that replacing the cheap capacitors on the GB Boy’s board can help here, but it highlights just how these clone systems keep managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by pairing what looks to be a pretty good IC with either the wrong or sub-par components.

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