5 felt like they half wrote 3 different games, realized they were running out of time, and then smushed them all together. Finishing the campaign becomes a chore long before the ending. Speaking of the ending if you do manage to chug through your reward is an abrupt and extremely weak ending that again feels like they just ran out of time

It’s crazy because then they plopped out red dead 2 which was a tremendously excellent narrative by comparison. They clearly have the means to make something fantastic.

If your firmware is old enough you can jailbreak it and run steamos already

You can run steamos on a jailbroken ps5 already. You need to be on a fairly old firmware though

Fair point, the experience is definitely worth the money for some as well as the hands on assistance. I guess this is more targeted at someone whos eyeing up a $250-300 modded gba on eBay

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

I don’t know about the class but you can mod a gameboy for way cheaper than ~$350 and it’s stupid easy to do.

A backlit ips screen is like $60 from us sellers but you can also buy them direct from china for like 1/3-1/2 that. Honestly that’s really the only thing with a crazy markup. The brackets to center the lcd, a new glass lens, etc are like $2-3 each. The install is pretty easy if you can handle disassembling a gameboy and putting it back together. The soldering is 3-5 wires depending on what screen and it’s stupid easy soldering. Some are solder free, the soldering is to just tap the signals for buttons so specific combinations will bring up the screens OSD, some use capacitive touch on the screen bezel instead (or in addition to). Some require minor case modification but that also stupid easy ($2 flush cutters and just remove some plastic ribs, basically)

A lithium battery mod is like $25 domestically and if you can install the normal alkaline batteries you can handle this one. Depending on what battery and what model gameboy you may have to solder 1-2 wires to a usb c board (gba/sp batteries sometimes have it integrated and you can get a replacement battery door with a hole or they come with one (that probably won’t match), gb/color/pocket usually have a daughterboard). The toughest bit is cutting a hole for the usb c charger but if you’re reshelling a lot of replacement shells come with that already done.

Speaking of reshelling that’s also stupid cheap. $10-20 should cover a shell and buttons. That said this can also get stupid expensive for exotic cases (like $100-200+ for boxypixel cases, which are cnc cut aluminum)

So at this point you’re spending 70-100 to do the mods most people do and watching a YouTube video is enough because it’s really easy. If you have no tools a $15 soldering iron beginner kit, $2 flush cutters, a small screwdriver set, and cheap wire strippers will cover everything. Nonconductive tape like kapton is also nice to have (don’t be a hot glue person yuck) but not essential

After that it’s other cheap mods you can add but aren’t typically considered “essential”. LED lighting under the buttons is like $20 and it’s just a flex pcb that you line up and tack on via a few solder points. You can get a fresh speaker, 2 wires to solder. You can also do things like replace the speaker amp but tbh I think this is silly, every gameboy sounds like shit regardless because the speaker is trash. The audio amps are slightly less distorted and louder trash, but still trash. Use headphones if you care that much. An hdmi mod for gba is like $50 and probably the hardest install here, though still fairly easy. Some people recap them while they’re open but I’ve never seen a gameboy with caps that caused issues. Even if you do decide this is worthwhile it’s only really necessary to do electrolytic caps and there aren’t many to do, the sp literally only has 1 (it’s surface mount but stupid easy to do). Iirc the og dmg has the most with 6 and they’re through hole

The main other cost is the console of course. This is where things can be kind of wild. A gameboy confirmed in good working condition can be a little pricey for what it is. Even then it’s still not usually expensive, $50-100 depending on how much of a deal you can find. But this is USA pricing. If you’ll be in Japan I’m sure you can get used gameboys all over for like $20-40, if yahoo jp auctions are any indicator. Buying a broken one is a gamble though they’re usually simple to fix, especially if you’re already planning to replace the screen and speaker. Those and cleaning the power switch/battery contacts fixes 95% of broken gameboys, they’re built like tanks regardless of revision

The idea of a class is neat ig because honestly a lot of sellers sell modded gameboys for $250-300 in the USA but they’re just making bank off of people who watch YouTubers that talk about console modding, think it’s neat, but are too scared to do what’s probably the easiest set of console mods in the world. I don’t do it anymore but I would buy lots of broken gameboys from yahoojp and mod them (buying mods in bulk makes this even cheaper) and easily double or triple my money. Don’t buy from people like me, just do it. It’s so goddamn easy

Sometimes I miss old forums where content was brought back up by simply posting within the topic (though that lead to the annoying and incessant “bump? bump? bump?” posts on threads people wouldn’t let die, i guess).

Post voting is understandable as an alternative but it just leads to so much vanity as a result. Sites like this and reddit have so many dorks that are like “my fake internet points… how could you”. If it matters that much to you just shitpost all the time and you’ll get those numbers up

I want a lightgun that works like those big chunky ones you’d see on arcade machines back in the day that weighed like 4 lbs and had servos to give it real clacky recoil. I know people make these and you can buy them (or even just pull ones off an old arcade cabinet and interface them with the hardware) but they’re way to expensive for me to actually buy though.

If it was like a $50-100 project maybe but I’m pretty sure it’s like $600+ and that’s just an obscene amount of money for this. But it would be fun