Meet HobbyChop: The Studio Keeping the Game Boy Singing
Updated: Sep 11
Some people look at a Game Boy and see a childhood. Others see a synthesizer waiting to be let out of its case. HobbyChop belongs firmly to the second group, and the grey brick is all the happier for it.
For a machine designed in 1989 to play Tetris on a bus, the Game Boy has enjoyed a remarkable second life as a musical instrument. That second life does not happen on its own. It depends on people who are willing to open the case, respect the hardware, and coax new sounds out of four humble sound channels. HobbyChop is one of those people, and we are delighted to feature the studio here in the Journal.
A studio built on retro obsession
HobbyChop describes itself as a small creative studio obsessed with retro tech, DIY sound, and nostalgic vibes, and that self-description turns out to be admirably accurate. For two years the studio sold handmade gear and designs on Etsy, connecting with makers and musicians all over the world, before opening its own shop at hobbychop.com. Every piece is still made by hand, with care, one unit at a time.
Handmade is not a marketing word here, it is the whole model. Selling on Etsy for two years meant every order was a small conversation with a real maker or musician somewhere in the world, and that habit of connection clearly stuck. The move to a dedicated shop feels less like a corporate step and more like a bigger workbench, with the same hands behind it.
If you have spent any time in chiptune circles you may already know the studio by its online handle, crunchypotato, which turns up on Etsy, Tindie and Bluesky. There is a YouTube channel called Chiptune-Anamnesis, an active Discord community, and an Instagram at hobbychop. It is, in the best sense, a one-bench operation with a global address book.
Turning the Game Boy into an instrument
HobbyChop's speciality is simple to state and hard to do well: they turn game hardware into instruments. On the Game Boy side, the cornerstone is the Arduinoboy, the open-source adapter that lets a Game Boy talk MIDI. The original design comes from Timothy Lamb, better known in the scene as trash80, and HobbyChop builds and sells ready-to-play units so you do not have to source the parts and solder your own.
The version that just joined our shelves is the Arduinoboy Pro, a fuller build with a DIN5 MIDI socket and an mGB cartridge already included, plus programs like LSDj, Chord, Drum & Bass II and Boom Bap. In plain terms, it lets a Game Boy sit inside a modern studio setup and take instructions from a MIDI keyboard, a sequencer or a DAW, while that companion mGB cartridge turns the handheld itself into a MIDI sound module. The Game Boy stops being a toy and becomes another voice in the rack.
If MIDI is new to you, think of it as the common language modern instruments use to talk to one another. Teaching a 1989 handheld to speak it fluently is a genuinely clever piece of work, and building those units reliably, by hand, is another skill entirely.
For a performer, the practical upshot is freedom. The same Game Boy that once lived in a coat pocket can now trigger from a full studio, lock to the tempo of everything else on stage, and hold its own next to synthesizers many times its price. That is a lot of music to pull from a chip that predates the World Wide Web.
A cartridge family that refuses to be quiet
Beyond the adapter, HobbyChop makes a whole family of chiptune cartridges, each one a small idea taken seriously. There is Droneboy for endless drones and pads, the GB-303 for acid basslines, the GB POLY-4M four-channel MIDI synth, the monophonic Chord, the BOOM BAP with its 221 MIDI-sync loops, Drum & Bass II with 190 breaks, the reactive glitch sequencer STUTTER, and PULSE\GRID, an 8-bit MIDI-reactive visualiser for when you want the Game Boy to watch the music instead of make it.
There are even homebrew games in the catalogue, among them Balloon.gb, Spirit Board Simulator and Techdweeb Zombies, because a studio this fond of the hardware was never going to stop at sound. HobbyChop also builds gear for other platforms, from the Nintendo DS and PSP to Sega's GenMDM, the YM2149F, the MT32 and a MIDI-Pi, but it is the Game Boy work that brought them to our door.
Handmade, and proud of it
What makes all of this worth featuring, and not just cataloguing, is the how. These are not mass-produced units stamped out by the thousand. They are assembled by hand, tested, and sent out one at a time, which is exactly the ethos a museum like ours wants to celebrate. Preserving the Game Boy is not only about keeping old cartridges safe under glass. It is also about the people who keep the platform alive and audible, who take a design that is more than thirty-five years old and give it something new to say.
Two new voices in the collection
We are pleased to say that two HobbyChop pieces have now joined the Game Boy Museum: the Arduinoboy Pro and the Droneboy cartridge. One opens the Game Boy up to an entire studio, the other asks it to hold a single, patient drone for as long as you like. Between them they sketch the range of what this little machine can do once someone with a soldering iron and good taste gets involved.
For us that pairing is close to perfect. A museum is at its best when it can show not just what a machine was, but what it became, and these two pieces do exactly that, side by side on the shelf.
It is also, quietly, the kind of cooperation we like to see. A museum cannot keep a living platform alive on its own, and studios like HobbyChop are a good part of the reason there is still something living to preserve.
If this has put a tune in your head, our ongoing series The Sound of the Game Boy digs deeper into how the handheld became a serious musical instrument, and where those four channels came from in the first place.
That same series digs into the two great Game Boy music trackers, nanoloop and LSDj, the software side of the story HobbyChop tells in hardware.
Our sincere thanks to HobbyChop for keeping the grey brick singing. To see where these two pieces sit among everything else, and to hear more of what the Game Boy has become, explore the collection at the Game Boy Museum.
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