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GTA 5 can now be played on the original Game Boy, at least if you’re willing to build and set up your own streaming cartridge.
The latest video from There.oughta.be, the tinkering-focused blog of German physicist Sebastian Staacks, breaks down the in-depth process required to explore the streets of Los Santos on a portable game console from 1989. It’s a real “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” type of situation.
Staacks started off with a cartridge he’d already devised to send data to a standard Game Boy over wifi (opens in new tab). Then he needed a way to figure out how to use it to do streaming video, which is tough, since the original Game Boy doesn’t actually have a built-in way to display fullscreen images – every image it renders is made of smaller tiles, and by default it can’t store enough unique tiles to fill its entire screen. You can check out Staacks’ full writeup (opens in new tab) to see how he cracked that particular chestnut and all the other problems that came up during the process.
The end result is a device that can stream any video from a PC to a stock Game Boy at 20 frames per second, and which can even send input data back using the Game Boy’s built-in controls. Granted, having a grand total of two face buttons means you have to mash Select to run, but hey! GTA 5 on a Game Boy!
Staacks also demonstrates how the same setup can be used to play Super Mario World, Crysis, Doom, or even to browse YouTube itself. If only we’d had one of these setups during all those long car rides to family get-togethers…
Going the other direction, rumors still persist that Nintendo plans to add Game Boy games to Nintendo Switch Online.
