There are many streamers who entertain the public life in which they play titles from the historic Game Boy, but to do so they rely on emulators and roms. And if instead, it was possible to organize live broadcasts in which the gameplay comes from a real Game Boy, moreover without any modifications to the hardware? This is the idea behind the project shown by the enthusiast Sebastian Staacks, who has created an ingenious method that uses a specially designed cartridge for a truly perfect final result.
Thirty years after its debut, the Game Boy continues to be one of the most loved consoles of all time and is at the center of surprising modding that stimulates the imagination of creatives. However, Sebastian Stacks had started from the assumption not to open the body of the console, but to find a literal plug-and-play method to allow the game to be broadcast live on the web, simply using a modern computer as a bridge. And so he has packaged a “passing” module which in the male part is inserted into the appropriate slot of the Game Boy and from the female part it receives the game cartridge. This accessory called GB Interceptor he can thus send the gameplay via USB to the computer which will then broadcast everything live for example on Twitch, YouTube or any other online container .
In reality, the operation is more sophisticated than it seems because GB Interceptor on the one hand collects the console commands and on the other uses the internal software to package a perfect copy of what the player sees on the display so as to send it in real time on the Web. The curiosity is that the computer treats the signal as if it came from a webcam connected via usb type-c and thus the gameplay can potentially also be used as a direct video chat like Zoom or similar. The project code is freely available on GitHub for anyone wishing to replicate it at home.
