Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Kickstarter for a working LEGO Game Boy, another modder is launching DIY upgrade kits – and these ones play actual cartridges.
The race to turn 72046 Game Boy into a fully-functional console is heating up. Substance Labs’ BrickBoy debuted on Kickstarter yesterday and will launch for crowdfunding on October 28, transforming the LEGO Super Mario set into a playable console using emulated Game Boy ROMs. If you’re prepared to wait a little longer, though, you might just be able to get your LEGO set playing genuine Game Boy cartridges.
That’s the promise laid out by the DIY kits from Natalie the Nerd, who was the first to turn the 421-piece set into a working console pretty much the day it came out. She’s now teaming up with Crowd Supply to make her mod – which she’s branding ‘Build a Boy’ – available to more people, facilitated by harvesting CPUs from damaged Game Boy Pockets. Natalie is planning to sell three different versions of her kit depending on your experience with modding consoles.
The ‘drop in and play’ kit requires pretty much no soldering experience, while the 100% DIY kit puts everything in your hands and is only recommended for soldering pros. Sitting in the middle is a kit that includes all you need apart from the Game Boy Pocket CPU and RAM (handy if you have one of those sitting around already). That one will reportedly cost $60, while Natalie told The Verge that she’s aiming for a $99 price for the drop-in kit.
That all-in-one package will include a 2.7-inch display that doubles the aspect ratio of the original Game Boy (from 160x144 to 320x320, upscaling the original images), working switches that sit behind the LEGO controls, a rechargeable battery, USB-C port, speaker and volume wheel. Natalie says you’ll also be able to purchase a glass screen if you’d rather swap out the plastic one in the LEGO set.
While we’re still waiting to see how much BrickBoy’s upgrade kits will cost, and when backers can expect to get them in hand, Natalie is apparently targeting early 2026 for hers. She’s not entirely sure she’ll have enough Game Boy Pocket CPUs to satisfy demand for the drop in and play kits, so make sure to keep an eye on her website if you’re interested in making your own copy of 72046 Game Boy playable with cartridges.
One key difference between these two projects (beyond the use of an emulator versus cartridges) is that Natalie’s console can’t play Game Boy Color games, a key feature of the middle-tier BrickBoy kit, because the Pocket CPU isn’t capable of that. But she does point out on her website that ‘this is more of a fun project [than] something you would play every day’.
You can find out more about how Natalie's mod works over on her blog. All of these kits will require a copy of 72046 Game Boy, which is available now at LEGO.com. Check out our review here.
Featured image: Natalie the Nerd
Support the work that Brick Fanatics does by purchasing your LEGO using our affiliate links – thank you.
Comments
Be the first to comment!