The Game Boy That Runs Windows: GBS Windows
Somewhere in the mid-1990s, a child parked at the family PC learned two things by heart: how to lose at Minesweeper, and how to make a colourful mess in Paint. GBS Windows puts both of them back in your hands, except now they run on a Game Boy Color. It is a loving, pixel-perfect impression of Windows 3.1, boxed on a real cartridge, and it is one of the most charming things to happen to the handheld in years.
Our copy was a generous donation from the developer Ruben Retro to the museum, and it is unusual enough to earn its place here even though, as we will see, it never quite touches the original grey brick.
A desktop on a handheld
GBS Windows is the work of the developer Ruben Retro, built, like so much of the modern Game Boy scene, in GB Studio. Switch on a Game Boy Color and it greets you with a grey desktop straight out of 1992: a mock boot screen, a command prompt to launch the interface, and then windows, icons and a familiar menu, all squeezed into the machine's tiny palette. It is not a port of Microsoft's operating system and it does not pretend to be. It is an affectionate recreation of the look and feel, and it captures the nostalgia exactly.
What lifts it above a static mock-up is that the programs actually work. There is a real game of Minesweeper. There is a little media player. And there is a Paint program that does something genuinely wonderful: it talks to the Game Boy Printer, so a doodle you make on the handheld can roll out of that small thermal printer on a strip of paper, precisely as nobody ever planned.
Boxed like it is 1992
The care extends to the object itself. GBS Windows arrives as a boxed cartridge, and both the box and the cartridge are modelled on early-90s Windows 3.1. The packaging echoes the software boxes that once lined computer shops, and the cartridge label is the best joke of all: it is dressed to look like a 3.5-inch floppy disk, the little square of plastic that every Windows install once came on. Holding it is a small time-warp. When something arrives boxed and labelled with this much love, it stops being a curiosity and becomes an artifact, and artifacts are what this archive keeps.
The wider world noticed too. When GBS Windows appeared it was written up everywhere from Time Extension to PCWorld, a rare piece of Game Boy homebrew that made the mainstream technology press do a double take. It arrived in 2025 at around forty-five dollars, and the first run sold out almost at once, with a second batch promised to meet demand. The boxed cartridge ships from Spain, and it is exactly the kind of modern object a Game Boy collection should be paying attention to.
Strictly Game Boy Color
Here is the one catch, and the reason this feature is an exception to our usual rule. GBS Windows runs only on the Game Boy Color, and on the Game Boy Advance that plays its cartridges. It does not run on the original 1989 DMG-01, the grey brick this museum is built around. Normally that would place it just outside our remit. But the project is so ambitious and so lovingly made, an entire desktop reimagined on a handheld, with working apps and a printer trick, that it would be plain stubborn to leave it out. Some things are exceptional enough to make their own case, and this is one of them. And there is one more reason to justify being part of the collection...
Ruben Retro clearly agrees that the grey brick deserves a nod, because of the detail that seals it. Put the cartridge into an original DMG-01 and it does not simply refuse to start. It detects the older hardware, pops up a message explaining that it needs a Game Boy Color, and then, by way of apology, lets you play a round of Minesweeper anyway. A consolation prize, coded in on purpose, for anyone who tries it on the wrong machine.
I could not resist documenting it. The screenshot below was taken on my Game Boy: Minesweeper, caught in four shades of grey.
Why it joins the collection
That little joke is also why GBS Windows earns a shelf. It may not run its desktop on the DMG-01, but it still hands you a game on one, and the game is Minesweeper, which I happen to love dearly. A cartridge that is part operating system, part art piece and part playable puzzle is exactly the sort of thing this collection exists to keep, so it joins the archive under Specials.
It also sits in a surprisingly old tradition. The Game Boy was never only a games machine: Nintendo itself sold translators and organisers, and people have since put all manner of things onto a cartridge. GBS Windows is a joyful modern entry in that lineage, the grey brick's younger, colour sibling borrowing the clothes of the beige box that once sat across the room. We are grateful that a copy found its way onto our shelves.
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