Title: Upgrade Your Car's Boring Dashboard with a Retro Game Boy
Emotive car enthusiasts might gripe about the lack of buttons in modern vehicles, but YouTuber John Sutley disproves this notion with an out-of-the-box hack: turning a 1989 Game Boy into a car's speedometer. This whimsical project, filled with DIY spirit, shines bright in an era where in-car screens grow larger and more distraction-prone with each generation.
Alas, I barely had the time to dig into Sutley's 55-minute deep dive, teeming with technicalities beyond my grasp. However, I've pieced together the essence of his process:
First, Sutley, an ingenious tinkerer, decides his goal is to utilize the Game Boy's 160×144-pixel dot-matrix display to mirror the car's mileage per hour. To accomplish this, he crafts custom circuit boards to bridge the CAN system and the iconic gaming device. The meticulous process takes months, yielding a clever form factor that snugly fits into the Game Boy's cartridge slot, with a wire connecting it to the car's internal computer.
The result? An uncanny, somewhat disheveled contraption, the electronics openly on display. While it may not replace those slick Android Auto/CarPlay displays, it'll undeniably set you apart as a tech-savvy car enthusiast.
But the practicality proves elusive: driving and recording a video of the pea-green Game Boy's screen emitting a glare was a challenge. Undeterred, Sutley swaps the original Game Boy for a sharper 90s-era Game Boy Pocket. Its more legible black-and-white screen presents the mileage better, meriting Sutley a well-deserved geek credo for what he coined, the "world's worst digital dash."
As the project's mastermind, Sutley concedes, "The whole notion of using your Game Boy as your car’s digital dash is ridiculous." Yet, it's this very madness that makes the project a spectacle, proving that such hacks aren't entirely impossible.
Intriguingly, Sutley's challenge lay in decoding the Game Boy's data bus, convincing it to think it loaded a game while displaying incoming speed data. This ingenious enterprise involved an intimate understanding of the Gam Boy's memory requests, and a schematic for the interface board that manipulated the device into unwittingly displaying the speed data.
In the future, this innovative technology could inspire more creative uses of vintage tech in modern vehicles. Despite its quirks, Sutley's tech-savvy hack showcases how technology can redefine our expectations of in-car displays.
