Video game consoles have evolved into multi-purpose entertainment hubs, allowing users to chat with friends, stream movies, and do more than just play games. Sebastian Staacks found a way to expand the capabilities of the Nintendo Game Boy, which turned it into the worst possible way to watch movies.
If you were a fan of Nintendo's earlier handheld consoles, you might remember that the color screen Game Boy Advance could be used to watch TV shows like Spongebob Squarepants, or full movies like the Shrek films. The image quality was terrible, limited to resolutions of only 160 x 160 for animated TV shows and even less for longer movies, but it was still better than the monster of a media player that Staacks has created.
The Game Boy was powered by a Sharp processor that was just 4.19 MHz, which is less than the speed of a modern phone and less than the power needed to decode and display compressed video files in real time. How did Staacks get Star Wars to play on that ugly screen?
Staacks shared a post on their personal blog last month detailing how they built a Game Boy with a wireless ESP8266 chip and several other components attached to a custom PCB. The Game Boy's processor is limited by it's capabilities, but Staack's earliest demonstrations include using telnet to send and receive simple text messages, and using a basic on. Staack came up with another use for the wireless cartridge that was far more interesting than the one he came up with for accessing Wikipedia.
Staack has promised a longer video explaining all the details at a later time, but they shared a short video of an original unmodified Game Boy using the custom wifi cartridge to stream Star Wars at 20 frames per second. Watching streamed video on the Game Boy is terrible, but the fact that it can be done is awesome. The Game Boy won't have a Disney+ app anytime soon.
