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Anybody here who made a custom Gameboy at a workshop in Tokyo? (piefed.ca)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by gedfromgont@piefed.ca to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world

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Will be travelling to Japan later this year and found out about these workshops in Tokyo where you get make "your own" modded Gameboy. Guessing modded refers to being able to choose custom shells and buttons, not so much to anything else there might be (I am not very knowledgeable about Gameboy mod scene).

Looks super cool, but is very pricey. Around 55.000 Yen for different courses, so I am a bit on the fence for booking it or not.

Anybody here have any experience with these? Would those be "normal" Gameboys you need cartridges for?

Edit: found a video of one, just in case someone is interested seeing how it goes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjHSz8goaZ8

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[–] gedfromgont@piefed.ca 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Thanks! Totally get your perspective on this, I would definitely not expect this to be same price as if I just did the research and shopping myself. I guess the upcharging is that someone is there to help you out and for people who would normally not think of doing something like that.

Can I ask you another question, how does it work with games on old Gameboys, are you forced to keep buying old cartridges or is there some way to load ROMs into these. They don't have any storage on them, right?

[–] KingKong33@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

You can buy a flash cart and load your ROMs onto an SD card which then goes into the cartridge. I'm not sure who all makes them for older game boys though apart from Everdrive. Its a bit spendy, but its absolutely worth it if you intend to use the device a lot.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah as the other person pointed out, if you want an experience that’s up to you. The upcharging makes sense for a class as they’ve got a lot more overhead. The upcharging makes far less sense for an already modded gameboy sold on ebay or marketplace

For roms you’d want a flashcart. No mod there, just buy the flashcart, put roms on sd, put sd in flashcart, play. There are flash carts for literally every cartridge based console you can think of. Even the disc consoles (eg Dreamcast, psx, GameCube) almost always have something like an optical drive emulator the replaces the disc drive with an sd card filled with roms (these are less “plug and play” than flash carts though, which literally are just cartridges with an sd slot and some firmware to load roms)

Imo a flashcart is necessary. There’s basically no drawback, unless you’re specifically into collecting originals. Occasionally they can struggle with edge cases (eg games on snes that used superfx chips or games that used rtc like Pokémon) but at this point 99.9% of those issues are solved (except maybe if you get a cheap Chinese clone cart with unknown firmware. Everdrive is the standard but for like 1/3-1/2 the price you can get lesser known models or clones and tbh most of these are fine. It’s pretty urgent to check Pokémon or Mario rpg works when you’re developing one of these I’d assume