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NEW TRICKS FOR AN OLD GREY BRICK

The Game Boy stopped getting new software a long time ago. I never quite accepted that, so I started building cartridges for it, and these are the three so far: a whole museum you can browse, a lab that tells you whether a console still works, and a label maker for the Game Boy Printer. They all run on a real 1989 Game Boy, and you don’t even need one to try them, just hit START on the emulator below and have a look.

GB Museum Cart Label.png

GB MUSEUM

GB Museum is the whole museum on a single Game Boy cartridge. It carries the consoles, accessories, games and history from this site, ready to browse on real hardware or right here in your browser, no Game Boy needed.

GB Test Lab

GB TEST LAB

GB Test Lab is a complete diagnostics suite for the original Game Boy. It checks every part of the machine, from screen and sound to memory, the link port and each cartridge-slot contact, and tells you straight what works and what doesn’t.

Homebrew Label Boy

GB LABEL BOY Alpha

GB Label Boy turns the Game Boy Printer into a real label maker. Type your own text, build QR codes and barcodes on the Game Boy itself, and print labels straight from the cartridge, with a live full-size preview.

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MORE TO EXPLORE

Part of a bigger story - the GB homebrew scene

These cartridges are the museum’s own small corner of something much larger. Decades after the Game Boy was discontinued, people around the world are still designing new games, new hardware and new music for it, and I have mapped out that whole living scene in one guide.

Still Building for the Grey Brick: A tour through the Game Boy's Living Scene

GBuddy's Escape - A Machine Learning Experiment  

There is also a fourth cartridge that goes a step further than the rest. In GBuddy’s Escape, the museum’s mascot teaches himself the way out of a maze entirely on the Game Boy’s own processor, with no internet, no server and no answer stored in advance. It is more an experiment than a tool: a small test of what a machine from 1989 can still do when nobody hands it the solution. The full story is in the Journal.

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GBuddy’s Escape: Machine Learning on an orignal Game Boy (DMG-01)

Start Building Your Own Games

And if you would like to try building something for the Game Boy yourself, I have written a small step by step tutorial for a simple snake game. Build Your Own Game Boy Game starts from a blank screen and ends with a playable game of Snake on real hardware, and Level Up Your Snake then turns that first attempt into a proper little game, with a title screen, a score, lives and sound.

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Write Your Own Game Boy Games: A Beginner's Journey in Two Series
 

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