The Carry-All DLX, a Case for Your Entire Game Boy Life

There is ambitious, and then there is this. Where most Game Boy cases hold a console and a couple of games, this arrival was built to swallow an entire Game Boy setup whole: the console, a dozen games and nearly every accessory a serious player owned, all zipped into one padded organiser.

What It Is

The Carry-All DLX is the larger version of ASCII's Portable Carry-All, built to hold a full Game Boy kit. One side carries the console, its manuals, the 4-Player Adapter (DMG-07), headphones (DMG-02), four AA batteries, a Game Light, the link cable and the Battery Pack (DMG-03); the other side holds twelve games in their cases, plus the battery pack's power cable. Many of those accessories are catalogued individually in the collection, as is the smaller Carry-All, which makes the DLX a natural flagship for the whole group.

Somewhere in here is the console. Everything else is just the supporting cast.

A Portrait of a Hobby, in a Case

The most charming thing about the Carry-All DLX is what its many compartments reveal. Each moulded slot is designed for a specific accessory, and reading that list, a light for the dark, a magnifier's cousin, a link cable for friends, a battery pack for the road, four spare AAs, is like reading a portrait of what it actually took to live with a Game Boy. The console alone was never quite enough; the full experience was a small ecosystem of add-ons, and this case is the object that finally tried to carry all of it in one place. It is the physical answer to the question of how a devoted player kept their whole hobby organised.

It comes from ASCIIware, the games-hardware arm of the Japanese publisher ASCII, a company better known to players for its controllers and peripherals. A padded, fabric organiser like this is exactly the kind of accessory that gets used hard and thrown away, its foam crushed and its zips worn, so a clean example with its shaped compartments intact is genuinely uncommon. Because it is designed around specific accessories, it also serves as a neat inventory of the era's must-have add-ons, several of which the collection holds separately, gathered here in one deluxe case.

The console packed a dozen games and every gadget it could dream of, and this case just said hold my zip.

Why It Joined the Collection

Storage and carry cases are an overlooked but revealing category, and the Carry-All DLX is the grandest of them, a single object that maps out the entire accessory ecosystem a keen player assembled. It ties together many of the individual accessories the collection already holds, and pairs with the smaller Carry-All to show the range in two sizes. Preserving it keeps a vivid, compartment-by-compartment record of what it really meant to own a fully equipped Game Boy.

The ASCII Carry-All DLX is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.