Eric Min's StereoBoy Reimagines the Nintendo Game Boy Pocket as an Expandable Music Machine
A Raspberry Pi RP2350 inside gives the StereoBoy serious power, while the cartridge system lets you add in new hardware at-will.
Electrical and computer engineering student Eric Min has unveiled a re-imagining of Nintendo's classic Game Boy handheld console as a music gadget — retaining interchangeable cartridges, but for expanding the hardware rather than loading games.
"This is StereoBoy, my senior project for Purdue ECE," Min says of the gadget. "Essentially, it's a hi-fi digital audio player (DAP) designed to be fit right into a GameBoy Pocket shell. The idea was to build a fun device where creative users can share their own hardware and software with others, along with great music of course. We really miss the days of physical media where people used to meet in person to share those things. StereoBoy is our idea of how we can sort of bring that back in a meaningful way."
Externally, the StereoBoy uses an off-the-shelf replica Nintendo Game Boy Pocket shell; inside, though, is a custom motherboard based around the two-of-four-cores Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller — which, with the user's choice of 32-bit Arm or RISC-V cores running at a stock 150MHz, is orders of magnitude more powerful than the 4.2MHz Sharp SM83 Nintendo picked for the original Game Boy.
Driving a color display, positioned alongside a through-hole LED stereo volume meter where the original Game Boy Pocket's FSTN display would have been, the microcontroller can handle both audio playback and high-performance visualization. Audio and additional software is loaded from cartridge, but that's not all you can plug in: "The cartridge port also exposes a whole bunch of GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output pins], including all eight HSTX [High-Speed Transmission] pins of the RP2350, allowing for some really cool hardware expansion, such as HDMI video output. This means StereoBoy can interface with different sensors, work with other electronic musical devices, or even play games!"
More information is available on Hackaday.io; Min has also opened a form for those who might be tempted to purchase a StereoBoy at an estimated $200, as a way of gauging interest ahead of any potential production run.