Retro handheld enthusiast and extreme tinkerer, Elliot Coll, has created an extra-long Game Boy. We think it’s kind of brilliant, actually?
Did you ever wonder what a Game Boy would be like it if were twice as long? Or is it twice as tall? That depends on what you consider the Y- or Z-axis on the Game Boy, we suppose. (And what is it called? Do you pronounce it Gaaaame Boy, or Game Booooy? We have so many questions!)
Enter Elliot Coll, of The Retro Future, to answer all these questions – and more! – that you didn’t even know you had.
For starters, the double-decker Game Boy, or the Long Boy, as Elliot refers to it, isn’t some custom-designed, 3D-printed case. It’s actually two Game Boy chassis joined together. (Kind of like a cut-and-shut car from a dodgy scrap yard, but nobody’s going to die as a result.)
I made the GameBoy longer for no reason – https://t.co/GktRqDIrya pic.twitter.com/sYA49bTFRR
— The Retro Future (@Elliot_Coll) May 14, 2020
To do this, Elliot took two faulty Game Boy handhelds and cut sections out of the casings to get them to join together. This involved careful adhesion of seams, custom-made panels to fill in the obvious gaps, and a few days of applying filler and gently sanding to get a smooth finish.
Then came the really tricky bit: stripping sections of the track on the donor Game Boy’s PCB, then soldering in long tails for the new position of the speaker and controller buttons. (It’s particularly pleasing that Elliot has a whole caddy full of Game Boy buttons, like most people have sewing or art materials.)
The whole video is 11 minutes long, but it’s well worth a watch, even if there’s no discernable reason why he would do such a thing.
Does Elliot use the extra space to fit in extra batteries, thus extending the runtime of the extra-long Game Boy? Nope; it’s still just four AA batteries. Does the extra chassis space hide any additional hardware components, perhaps supporting emulation? Absolutely not; other than its weird length, this is a thoroughbred Game Boy. Does it make it nicer to play? No; quite the opposite, in fact.
But it’s a thoroughly entertaining watch, and a lovely, comforting watch. It’s kind of like watching The Great British Bake Off, but for retro hardware, which is exactly the right amount of weird we need during these exceedingly weird times.
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