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What we would have given to play games in the dark! Now we can play in full color with backlit screens, loud speakers, and modern rechargeable batteries.' вЂњModding Game Boys today not only brings back some good memories, but expands upon the desires we had to make the experience even better. 'As kids we decked out our Game Boys with lights, screen protectors, battery packs,вЂќ Capel says. Custom-cut, scratch-resistant glass screen covers? He's got those too. A rainbow of plastic shells and buttons in glow-in-the-dark, translucent, or neon hues? Yep. Want to add an internal battery that charges over USB? He's got that.

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Kyle Capel, CEO of online store Hand Held Legend, stocks a wide variety of mods that can tweak a Game Boy's exterior appearance or bestow it with new functionality. With this essential fix for the console's AchillesвЂ™ heel out of the way, it makes sense that whatвЂ™s left on any modder's wish list are nice-to-haves, additions that let Game Boy enthusiasts customize the less-critical components. In order to make it work, he had to whip up an adapter cable to let the new display talk to the old 'Boys, and he had to add a custom-programmed chip that got the new screen perfectly in sync with the console's circuit board.

'A few months into releasing the Game Boy Color mod, we noticed the prices of reproduction AGS-101 LCDs starting to climb and original AGS-101 consoles being destroyed for the LCD.' Through his suppliers in China, Grimmett found a color LCD screen that was the perfect shape for the older Game Boys with square screens. Modders needed to hack away at the plastic inside the Game Boy to fit the newer screen inside, and even then, it was a tight fit that required shaving every possible millimeter from the handheld's circuit board.

The Game Boy Color installation 'was complicated and required a fair degree of dexterity to modify the shells to accept an LCD almost as wide as the console itself,' Grimmett says. Grimmett's shop relied on the AGS-101 display for one of its products, a ribbon cable that adapted the display for use in the older Game Boy Color.

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In the Game BoyвЂ™s heyday, there were no software updates to download, games started up at once, and a fresh set of AAs was all you needed to keep playing all day.Д®nter Ben Grimmett, who runs a boutique hardware shop called BennVenn that serves the Game Boy hacking community. Nintendo engineer and Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi famously relied on a philosophy of вЂњlateral thinking with withered technology.вЂќ In short, Yokoi preferred to find how far older, cheaper tech could be stretched to still provide hours of PokГ©mon-catching, Goomba-stomping fun. Always intent on making its game systems affordable and efficient, the Kyoto, Japan-based company has a long history of keeping its consumer products technologically behind the curve in an effort to hold costs down. Today's Game Boy modding scene largely sprang up in response to NintendoвЂ™s own conservative tendencies. Groups of hackers who congregate on the r/Gameboy subreddit, on Discord, on Instagram, and across YouTube have been dragging NintendoвЂ™s tiny, world-beating machine into the 2020s by creating a cottage industry of parts, custom components, and prebuilt modified Game Boys along the way. Rather, these underpowered, inexpensive toys are canvases for creativity and experimentation. And because the system was propped up by Nintendo's thousands-deep library of titles, the Game Boy remains one of the top-selling videogame consoles of all time.Д«ut for a gang of modders and hackers on the internet, these machines arenвЂ™t something to be left in the past. It went through seven different design iterations, six of which were sold in the US. From its launch in 1989 until its discontinuation in 2008, Nintendo's handheld gaming device sold hundreds of millions of units.