Boom Boy Is the Answer to “What If Nintendo Made a Boombox?”
What if Nintendo had made boomboxes instead of consoles? It might have looked something like this Boom Boy.
While the company has certainly made some missteps, Nintendo has done a lot of things right since they entered the video game market. And one area in which they excelled — particularly in the ‘80s and ‘90s — was industrial design. The NES and original Game Boy are both testaments to that. But what if Nintendo had made boomboxes instead of consoles? It might have looked something like this Boom Boy.
Boom Boy is Johan’s take on the devices of an alternate timeline in which music came on cartridges and Nintendo made consumer audio equipment. It borrows a lot of aesthetic touches from Nintendo’s industrial design language of the ‘80s, giving a vibe that seems to be half Famicom and half DMG-01 Game Boy. And the “killer feature” is the cartridge-based music storage system, which is just plain cool.
In the 1980s, storing digital music was a really tough challenge. That’s why compact discs were invented, but they were still in their infancy at that time and CD players were very expensive. Cartridges would have been a poor solution in that era, because they would have had very little capacity. But with modern technology, the challenge is a trivial.
The Boom Boy’s cartridges are really just adapters and housings for SD card reader module breakout boards. The cartridges’ edge connectors simply pass power and SPI signals to an Unexpected Maker FeatherS3[D] MDB (Microcontroller Development Board) in the Boom Boy. That hosts an ESP32-S3, so it has plenty of processing power to decode MP3s. It then sends signals to a PCM5102 DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) and then an Adafruit MAX98306 class D amplifier that feeds the pair of small speakers.
All of those components fit into the rad 3D-printed enclosure and power comes from a 2000mAh lithium battery. A handful of buttons and a potentiometer dial let the user control playback.
With SD cards available with massive capacity, Johan could probably put his entire music collection on a single cartridge. But that isn’t fun. It is a lot more satisfying to dedicate each cartridge to a particular artist, album, or playlist.