#game-boy

#game-boy

The Game Boy family of handheld consoles was groundbreaking, making gaming more accessible to millions worldwide. Nintendo's portables beat off technologically superior competition from the likes of Sega's Game Gear and Atari's Lynx. They became home to foundational moments for the medium, from what is still arguably the definitive version of Tetris to the birth of Pokémon. Yet with the iconic gray monolith launching in 1989, it's now pushing 40-and playing those important classics gets tougher every year.

The DIY starts off by creating a 3D printed shell (using a light curing printer, printing for a week) that houses the 10-inches electroluminescent LCD TV that emulates the warm glow of the original Game Boy. The choice of the display makes sense as the soft glow illuminates the pixels that otherwise would look too harsh on the big display compared to small screen of the Game Boy.

The goal of Chromatic in a non-technical sense is not to replicate the experience of actually playing a Game Boy or Game Boy Color, it's to replicate the way that you felt playing it when you were younger. You want it to be authentic but also to live up to that rose-tinted recollection of how you remember it.