Get Ready to Play Your Favorite Game Boy Cartridges on Your TV with This New DIY Kit from IntecGaming

Have you ever wanted to play Game Boy games on your modern TV? In the past, Nintendo has released console accessories like the Super Game Boy for the SNES and the Game Boy Player for the Gamecube to allow gamers to plug their physical cartridges in and play on your TV. In addition, through the virtual console on the Wii and Wii U, you could buy digital copies of your favorites (assuming they were available on the VC) and play them that way. Of course, you could also use emulation via a Raspberry Pi However, what about all those physical cartridges that you own. What if you wanted to play those on your TV? Well, you could modify your Game Boy to output, but even then, you’re typically limited to composite connections which are pretty darn low quality. Thankfully, there are some cool things out there called consolizers and a new one is now on Kickstarter from IntecGaming.

IntecGaming currently has their GBA HDMI Kit up on Kickstarter and it allows you to put your favorite physical Game Boy games into it and then play them on your TV. I learned about this new kit from Macho Nacho, and you can watch his video below about it, but let’s talk more about what is cool about this kit. Not only does this allow you to play your favorite Game Boy games on your modern TV, but it has support for Bluetooth so you can use your favorite modern controller if you’d like or use the SNES controller port to use your favorite controller that supports that input. It even has a controller that is essentially just a Game Boy Advance with the guts changed. It sounds pretty great.

The kit does require some work as it is a DIY kit though and it does require you to sacrifice a Game Boy Advance although they do provide instructions to help you along the way. Another nice aspect is that this kit doesn’t require you to do any soldering which is something that many feel is out of their wheelhouse. Also, the price is better than the other leading consolizer which costs $160 without a case for it while this one can currently be grabbed for less than that with a case. Sounds pretty great.

Now, this does sound perfect, but there are some caveats. There’s a switch that lets you change the aspect ratio between 4:3 and 16:9. Unfortunately, neither of these are the aspect ratios used by Game Boys. The original used a 10:9 ratio while the GBA used a 3:2. This means that games will look squished or stretched depending on which ratio you do play on. That being said, for many, that’s a small trade off that they can live with.

This looks really cool and if you’re a DIY person who wants to play their favorite Game Boy games on a TV, this appears to be a great option for you. As of writing, the project has over 30 days left and has reached roughly $21,300 out of their $49,700 goal.