Game Boy XXL: A Larger Than Life Trip Down Memory Lane

Forget about playing on your itsy bitsy smartwatch screen (or running a full desktop OS, for that matter). Playing games on the big screen is the way to go. OK, maybe there are times when that can also be taken too far, like this latest toy, if you can still call it that, to come out of Hack-a-Day. If you thought the 3DS XL was large, take a gander at its ridiculously large ancestor. The Game Boy XXL lets you play your favorite childhood titles, and then some.

This isn't the first homage to the venerable gaming handheld, and it will hardly be the last. Five years ago, someone tried to do something similar, fitting a Nintendo 64 console into a GameBoy-like box. There are, however, a few key differences. For one, this latest attempt is a lot larger. For another, this doesn't actually use Nintendo hardware, which will probably bring up questions of legality.

The Game Boy XXL uses a Raspberry Pi to be the brains of the contraption, utilizing the Retropie project that turns the hacker's board into, well, a retro gaming computer. As such, it can do more than just play Game Boy games. It can do NES, SNES, and other things that you can throw at it. Of course, those would probably play weird on the giant Game Boy controls. The screen itself is just a regular 19-inch monitor taken apart and reassembled for this very purpose and then calibrated to emulate the Game Boy's colors.

Here's a very telling shot of the scale of the finished product. This is definitely no handheld.

And in case you might think it's all show, here's 5 minute clip of the creator playing Pokemon and beating Brock.

And of course it won't be Game Boy without Tetris.

SOURCE: Hackaday