Fresh Find: The Joyplus Handy Boy, an All-in-One Add-On

The original Game Boy had a well-known list of shortcomings: a small screen, no backlight and tinny mono sound. This arrival tried to fix all of them at once. The Joyplus Handy Boy is one of the most curious accessories the console ever had, an all-in-one answer to the machine's most common complaints.

Small screen, no backlight, tinny sound: solved in a single clip-on unit.

What It Is

The unit clips onto the console and bundles three fixes into one housing: a magnifying lens to enlarge the small screen, two lamps to make up for the missing backlight, and stereo sound through a pair of built-in speakers. Cleverly, it needs no batteries of its own, drawing power directly from the Game Boy through a neat cable connection. It is the kitchen-sink approach to accessorising, everything a player might want, strapped on at once, and boxed examples have become genuinely hard to find, which makes it a notable piece for accessory collectors.

Boxed and complete, which for an all-in-one this ambitious is a genuine find.

Why It Joined the Collection

Accessories that try to answer every one of the Game Boy's limitations at the same time are a small, delightful category, and the Handy Boy is one of its stars. It captures an era of restless invention, when third-party makers competed to bolt light, magnification and sound onto a machine that had none, and it does so with more ambition than most. A boxed, complete example is a real find, and it sits proudly among the collection's other light, lens and power add-ons as one of the most fully featured of them all.

The Joyplus Handy Boy is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.