“A few months ago,” writes PhyFawkes, a member of Reddit’s “Steam Deck Modded” community, “I had the idea: ‘The Steam Deck motherboard seems pretty small. I wonder if you could make a Steam Deck the size of a Gameboy?’”
Ideas like this are a perilous business—for every one that’s concluded, “And the answer was, ‘Yes!’,” there are many more than have turned into money sinks that have proven more difficult/impractical/etc than they ever appeared at first glance. Happily, though, PhyFawkes’ project is looking increasingly likely to fall into the former category than the latter.
As per their post on the r/SteamDeckModded subreddit, the SteamBoy—as the creation is called—appears to be coming along very nicely indeed. The device puts the Steam Deck motherboard into a Gameboy form factor, which looks a good bit chonkier than my memory of the real thing. That’s probably more an issue with my memory though; in this demo video, PhyFawkes assures us it’s the same dimensions as the original Gameboy, i.e. 32mm, or just over an inch, thick.
Anyway, so far the mod has basically involved connecting up the buttons on the SteamBoy’s case to the actual Steam Deck’s inputs. The one part that’s not working yet is the screen—which, as PhyFawkes writes, presents the biggest challenge. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the original Gameboy came with an LCD that displayed—count ‘em, because you literally could—160 x 144 pixels in two-bit “color,” i.e. four shades of green. The SteamBoy version is a full color 1200 x 1080 display that was originally meant for use in VR headsets.
The most recent post on the topic, which was made over the weekend, explains that getting the screen working will require “a custom adapter PCB [printed circuit board] between the display and motherboard,” as well as modding the Steam Deck’s BIOS. The adapter is apparently required because the Steam Deck’s display output doesn’t follow a standard pin layout, although there’s some debate as to whether an entire custom PCB is required.
In the meantime, as the demo video demonstrates, the device can happily output video to an external monitor, which is something that a Gameboy absolutely could not do: indeed, the concept of doing so probably wouldn’t have crossed anyone’s mind in the heyday of the original device. What a time to be alive, and so on, and so forth.
