The LEGO company has a long history of releasing kits that are models of other products and they tend to be pretty popular, as they entice fans of both those products and of LEGO in general. But most of them are non-functional, in the sense that they don’t work like the products they’re inspired by. The Pixar Luxo Jr. lamp, for example, doesn’t actually light up and is purely decorative. Natalie the Nerd was disappointed to learn that the new LEGO Game Boy was similarly inert, so she went about converting it into a functional console that is actually playable.
Natalie is an expert on everything Game Boy. She sells a whole catalog of parts for modding various Game Boy models, offers repair services, hosts a lot of useful reference documentation on her wiki, and performs all kinds of fun conversions of her own. Earlier this year, for instance, her transparent Game Boy Color — complete with transparent PCB — got a lot of attention in the Game Boy modding community.
This project is Natalie’s best work yet. She took the LEGO Game Boy set, which is just supposed to be lifeless pile of bricks in the shape of the console, and made it functional. Even more impressive, she did most of that work before she even got her hands on one of the sets.
Natalie got started when she saw LEGO Japan’s tweet about the release of the Game Boy set. Immediately, she saw the opportunity and began designing. She didn’t have any real dimensional information to base her design on and so used the screen inserts as references for size.
She knew two things: that she wanted to use real Game Boy hardware and that she’d need to make the mainboard as small as possible to fit. For that reason, she used a Game Boy Pocket CPU, which is easy to support and has internal VRAM, eliminating the need for external VRAM on the PCB. She used her own Safe Charger board power supply circuit and other space-saving techniques to produce a mainboard that is about the size of a Game Boy cartridge. That means it can fit in the space between the cartridge and the screen on the LEGO Game Boy.
Around that time, Natalie was able to snag a LEGO Game Boy kit to put everything together. The only piece left in the puzzle is connecting the LEGO buttons to her mainboard. She should have that figured out soon and will publish the project details when does.
