Please make this keychain-sized Game Boy a reality
Back in the early days of the Nintendo Game Boy, it was revolutionary that a full-fledged gaming experience could fit easily into a backpack.
The latest evolution of the Game Boy, which was unveiled during a recent Hackaday presentation, doesn't only just fit in a bag or a pocket — it's small enough to clip right onto your keyring.
Behold: the tiniest functional Game Boy known to man, courtesy of Jeroen Domburg, aka Sprite_TM.
The hacker created the tiny device using a color OLED screen and an ESP32 microcontroller. The setup includes just about everything you got with an old-school Game Boy: a functional direction pad, buttons, and even speakers for in-game audio.
Even with the tiny package, the 2016 tech used to create the keychain Game Boy (or as I'd like to call it, the Key Boy) makes it much cooler than its much bigger predecessors. Instead of cartridges (just imagine how little those would have to be), it has ability to load new games wirelessly. Since it runs an emulator, it can play decidedly non-Nintendo games like Doom.
Sadly, this is a complex build that probably won't be making it onto store shelves anytime soon, even if Nintendo was interested in bringing Tetris to keychains everywhere.
But you can see how it all came together if you check out the video of Sprite_TM's whole presentation on the Key Boy below (be warned: it's 45 minutes long). According to the Hackaday, he plans to release his code and more info on the build on his personal page, so if you really need this tiny blast from the past in your life, maybe you can just make one yourself.
Topics Nintendo
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
