Grand Theft Auto 5 Playing On Original Game Boy

Sebastian Staacks is a coder, whose blog There Oughta Be is packed with technical interests from LED cubes to an automated irrigation system for his garden. Now Staacks has taken on the nostalgia ante considerably with, first, he created the WiFi Game Boy cartridge and, now, managing to get Grand Theft Auto 5 and Doom running on Nintendo’s classic hardware.

“A few weeks ago I created a Game Boy cartridge with built-in WiFi,” writes Staacks. “Now I taught it to stream video and play games—in full resolution. At 20 fps. On an unmodified original Game Boy.”

Staacks has a technical write-up of how he did it here, and a video explaining, in which you can see the game playing on the hardware. It obviously looks like exactly what it is: An all-singing, all-dancing technical showcase running on a 1989 gadget that, even at release, was being unfairly criticized as obsolete. This thing is absolute magic, check out the video below.

“With this new demo,” writes Staacks, “many other demos almost become obsolete. I can display anything and I can control anything that can be displayed on and controlled by my PC. Of course, the interface and image are almost unusable this way, so some dedicated implementations might still be interesting. And also, I did not touch audio here, which unfortunately was a big oversight by me when designing this cartridge.”