Sooner or later, most gamers have to decide what to do with consoles that are no longer relevant. Some people hide them in a closet or donate them to charity, but it’s difficult: it can be sad to retire an old console. Sometimes, however, someone rejects obsolescence altogether and gives new life to outdated hardware. In 2016, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enthusiast Gautier Hattenberger rediscovered his original Game Boy at his parents’ house and transformed it into a working drone controller.
In a video that’s as inspiring as it is surreal, Hattenberger shows off the decades-old handheld used to rotate, steer, and land a Parrot ARDrone 2.0 in real time. To achieve this, consider trading Pokémon using a link cable and a Game Boy, which sends and receives bits of data through the link port. Hattenberger created a modified link cable and connected the Game Boy to an Arduino, capturing the transmitted signals. This data was then transmitted via an FTDI chip to the USB port of his laptop. After coding a small program that mapped the Game Boy’s inputs to the drone’s controls, Hattenberger’s drone was ready to fly.
The original Game Boy is surprisingly versatile
There was a small compromise to be made. The original Game Boy’s passthrough port was only designed to handle 1 KB/s of traffic, well below what’s needed for live video streaming. As such, it is not possible to view the drone camera on the Game Boy, only through the laptop. That said, the Game Boy games are worse than you remember and only support a screen resolution of 160 x 144 pixels, so the experience probably wouldn’t have been great anyway. Despite this, Hattenberger’s controller is arguably the most impressive achievement of Game Boy-powered aviation to date.
Maybe it’s the nostalgia factor, but people seem determined to continue hacking and reusing the Game Boy today. Its warm 8-bit sound makes it a popular choice for creating chiptune music, and industrious hackers have gone so far as to turn the Game Boy camera into a working webcam, install a backlight, and even add partial Wi-Fi support.
Aside from aging hardware, one of the factors impacting how far the Game Boy can be pushed is its small (by modern standards) number of inputs. That’s why one of the first steps towards using a Raspberry Pi mod to emulate classic titles on a Game Boy is to add additional buttons. If you love learning and hate getting rid of old hardware, consider modding your Game Boy. As Hattenberger proved, aside from bitrate, the only real limitation is what you can imagine.
