The Game Boy That Learned to Google: Sebastian Staacks and There Oughta Be
Updated: 1 day ago
In December 2021 a short video started making the rounds among retro tinkerers. It showed an original 1989 Game Boy, pea-soup screen and all, slowly pulling up a Wikipedia article. Not an emulator, not a mock-up. A real grey brick, reading live text off the internet through a cartridge that someone had built by hand. That someone was Sebastian Staacks, a physicist in Aachen who runs a gloriously nerdy blog called There Oughta Be, and his little cartridge is one of the most delightful things ever plugged into Nintendo's handheld.
A cartridge with WiFi
The Game Boy was never meant to go online. Its cartridge slot is not a friendly, chatty port; it is a raw parallel memory bus, clocking away at one megahertz, built for one job only: feed the console bytes fast enough to keep up. Staacks describes the interface as one that "really means business", and getting a modern wireless chip to politely take part in that conversation is genuinely hard.
His solution is elegant. Rather than replace the whole cartridge with a fast microcontroller, he kept a plain 32 kilobyte EEPROM to serve the boring, static data, and bolted on a cheap ESP8266 WiFi module left over from another project. A handful of logic gates map just two bytes of the Game Boy's memory to the WiFi chip, so the console can read from and write to the internet as if it were reaching for any other address. With that, the Game Boy could log in over telnet and browse Wikipedia, one four-shade screen at a time.
Staacks is refreshingly honest about what it is. The whole thing costs about fifty euros in parts, the schematics and code are open source, and he cheerfully admits it is a hack held together by a physicist rather than an electrical engineer. He did not build it to be useful. He built it, in his own words, to prove to himself that he understood the old hardware well enough to extend it. That is exactly the spirit this museum loves.
His Mona Lisa: the GB Interceptor
The WiFi cartridge is the crowd-pleaser, but Staacks himself points to a quieter project as his masterpiece, and it is a far subtler piece of engineering. The GB Interceptor is a small adapter that sits between an unmodified Game Boy and its cartridge and produces a live video feed of the game over USB. No soldering, no modification to the console, nothing added inside. You stack it into the slot, plug in a cable, and your gameplay appears on a computer.
The clever part is how it sees the picture. The Interceptor never taps the video the Game Boy actually draws. Instead it quietly eavesdrops on the cartridge's memory bus, watching every instruction the console pulls from the game, and feeds that stream into a custom emulator running on a Raspberry Pi RP2040. That emulator recreates, in perfect step, the exact image the Game Boy is showing and hands it to your computer as an ordinary USB webcam. The console plays the real game on real hardware; the capture is a flawless shadow, reconstructed from the data racing past. Staacks was so taken with the problem that he gave a talk at the Chaos Communication Congress on how to rebuild a Game Boy's screen purely by listening to its memory bus.
Like everything on There Oughta Be, it is fully open source, from the PCB to the firmware to the 3D-printed case, and it filled a real gap: for years there was no clean, affordable way to capture original Game Boy footage without gutting the console. If the WiFi cartridge is the party trick, the Interceptor is the connoisseur's favourite.
A physicist who keeps coming back
What makes Staacks worth a whole feature, rather than a single clever gadget, is that he keeps returning to the grey brick. There Oughta Be is less a product line than a workshop with the door left open, and the Game Boy keeps wandering back in.
Some of those returns are pure craft. After buying a CNC machine he milled a complete Game Boy shell out of walnut, matching wooden cartridges and all, right down to a hand-carved "Pokemon Walnut Version" label. Others are software: the Game Boy Slideshow, a website where you drag in your own photos and get back a real ROM that plays them on original hardware; and the Game Boy Photo Booth, built for a cousin's wedding, which turns a Game Boy Camera and a Game Boy Printer into a working booth that hands guests grainy thermal-paper keepsakes. And some are just for the fun of it, like the working display he slipped into the newly released Lego Game Boy, a small stunt so the brick-built model could show an actual game of Tetris.
None of these had to exist. That is precisely the point. They are, as his blog cheerfully puts it, "overcomplicated devices nobody needs", and each one is a small argument that a 35-year-old handheld is still a fine place to have an idea.
Why it belongs in a Game Boy museum
A museum is usually thought of as a place for finished, closed history: the object under glass, the story safely in the past. But the Game Boy has never quite agreed to stay in the past, and neither has this collection. We have documented the complete DMG-01 and everything Nintendo shipped in the box, and we have also told the first-person story of building a Game Boy back to life by hand. Staacks sits squarely in that second, living tradition.
His work is a reminder that the machine Gunpei Yokoi designed to be cheap, rugged and simple turned out to be an almost perfect canvas for tinkerers. Simple enough to understand down to the last pin, sturdy enough to survive endless experiments, and beloved enough that people still want to see what else it can be made to do. A cartridge that browses Wikipedia, or an adapter that steals a picture out of thin air, is not really about the feature. It is about someone looking at an old, "obsolete" object and refusing to accept that its story is over.
This story has become personal in one more way. Thanks to Sebastian's generosity, an original GB Interceptor, given directly by its inventor, now has a permanent home in the collection. It stands for exactly the kind of living, hands-on history this museum exists to keep.
You can find the GB Interceptor, the WiFi cartridge, the photo booth and a whole catalogue of other beautifully unnecessary builds at there.oughta.be. Bring a sense of humour and a soldering iron. The Game Boy, it turns out, still has plenty of firsts left in it.
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