The Game Boy That Became a Controller: insideGadgets and the Wireless Cartridge

For thirty-five years the Game Boy has been the thing you hold: the self-contained little world you disappear into on a bus. So there is something wonderfully backwards about picking one up, pressing start, and using it to play a game on a completely different console across the room. That is exactly what insideGadgets' Wireless Game Boy Controller does, and it is one of the cleverest small hardware ideas the platform has seen in years.

One cartridge, many consoles

The idea is easy to describe and fiddly to build. You slot a transmitter cartridge into the Game Boy, and from that moment the handheld stops being a console and becomes a wireless gamepad. A matching receiver, small enough to hide inside another machine or plug into a controller port, picks up the signal. insideGadgets makes receivers for a startling spread of hardware: a USB dongle for a PC or Raspberry Pi, and console-specific versions for the NES, the Super Nintendo, the Nintendo 64, the GameCube, the Wii, and even the NES and SNES Classic Minis. A single transmitter can talk to as many receivers as you like at once.

It works with almost every grey-era machine, too. The Game Boy transmitter supports the original DMG, the Pocket, the Color and both Advance models, so whichever Game Boy you are sentimental about can be the one in your hands while Mario runs around on a television.

How it works

This is not Bluetooth. insideGadgets built the controller on a plain 2.4GHz radio link, the same family of cheap modules hobbyists use for everything from drones to weather stations. Every two milliseconds the cartridge scans the buttons and fires off a small packet to the receiver, fast enough that lag is not an issue for the kind of games you would actually want to play this way. Range is around eight metres of line of sight on an original Game Boy. There is no pairing app and no encryption: you hold start at boot to pick a channel, press A, and any receiver listening on that channel blinks to confirm it is synced.

There is even a lovely tell that it is working. On an original Game Boy you can hear a faint buzzing from the speaker as the packets go out. The machine is quite literally humming with the effort of talking to the outside world.

The maker behind it

The controller is the work of insideGadgets, a small Australian outfit run by a maker who goes by Alex. It began in 2010 as an electronics blog full of teardowns and half-finished experiments, and grew, project by project, into one of the most important little hardware shops in the Game Boy world. If you have ever backed up a Game Boy cartridge or rescued a dying save file, there is a good chance you did it with their GBxCart RW, a reader, writer and flasher that has quietly become a preservation staple. Alongside it sit flash carts, camera add-ons, replacement boards and a shelf of other oddities, all designed and assembled in house.

The wireless controller is a fine example of the house style: take the Game Boy seriously as a piece of living hardware, then make it do something Nintendo never imagined.

Why it belongs in a Game Boy museum

This collection exists to argue that the Game Boy was, and still is, far more than a games machine. We have documented everything Nintendo shipped in the original box and told the first-person story of rebuilding a Game Boy by hand. A cartridge that turns the handheld into a universal controller belongs in exactly that company.

A word of thanks belongs here, too. insideGadgets generously provided the wireless controller documented in this article for the collection, where it now has a permanent home. That kind of openness is a large part of how the Game Boy stays alive and well recorded.

There is also a quieter reason. Makers like insideGadgets are part of why these machines are still usable at all. The same workbench that produced a wireless controller also produced the tool half the hobby reaches for to preserve its games. Keeping the Game Boy alive is not only about the objects on a shelf; it is about the people still building for it. You can find the wireless controller, the GBxCart RW and the rest at insidegadgets.com. Just do not be surprised when your Game Boy ends up controlling your television.

For what else that cartridge can drive, see our look at the Game Boy as a wireless controller for everything.