Can you connect the 80s to the Internet? The truth is that it would be the dream of retrofuturists and a user has taken the first step to do so. In fact, he has created a special cartridge for the old Nintendo Game Boy that can connect it to the Internet via WiFi . Honestly, it was something that I never thought could be achieved, but thanks to that connection, you can do something quite useful with your new Game Boy Online. We explain how such a feat has been achieved.
If you thought that your old Nintendo Game Boy only served to make you nostalgic (and see how badly you two have aged when you get with it) now you can give it new life. At least if you’re a hardware genius like Sebastian Staacks, physicist, programmer, and creator of amazing things like the one we’re showing you today.
A cartridge for the Nintendo Game Boy that allows you to connect it to the Internet via WiFi .
How to connect your Game Boy to the Internet and read Wikipedia
Specifically, it is a basic 32kB Game Boy cartridge with an ESP8266 microcontroller to add Wifi capabilities . With this, you can access data from the Internet or your local network on the Game Boy, or send data from the console to any other device that can communicate.
Here’s a rendering of the WiFi cartridge PCB. Once in the Game Boy, it can go online and do a few things, pre-programmed into the device. If you want to see it in action, do not hesitate to take a look at the video that we have put up for you.
Before we get too excited, clarify that this cartridge does not allow you to play your old games online , nor access your library of ROMs through the network.
Playing online would only be possible if the games were modified significantly, because they have no idea what a network is, or how to manage their lag, or how Internet access even works. They were other simpler times when they were created.
So what makes it possible to do what Sebastian Staacks has achieved? Well, very basic communication via the network in text format , for example, using the veteran Telnet protocol. That is to say, bareback and without security, encryption or anything like that, which is how current communications of this type are handled.
However, that hasn’t stopped him, within the cartridge he has built, Staacks, from implementing two demos to show what his invention can do.
One of them is a simple communication demonstration that allows you to connect to the cartridge via Telnet and send and receive text messages .
The second, much more curious, is a Wikipedia client , which allows you to enter the title of an article and obtain the “extract” of said article and display it on the Game Boy screen.
As you can see in the images, it may not be the best way to read the encyclopedia, but it is amazing that a Game Boy can connect to the Internet, and wirelessly.
Staack himself is working on more demos. Given that type of protocol, in theory you can do anything that means viewing text on the screen, such as a very basic browser for Reddit or Twitter .
Undoubtedly, the ingenuity of some gets out of hand and, if you are a handyman yourself, on the Staack website you have how he has done it . In the meantime, I’ll keep waiting for someone to build the same with a Spectrum, to dig up my own.
