âA few months ago,â writes PhyFawkes, a member of Redditâs âSteam Deck Moddedâ community, âI had the idea: âThe Steam Deck motherboard seems pretty small. I wonder if you could make a Steam Deck the size of a Gameboy?ââ

Ideas like this are a perilous businessâfor every one thatâs concluded, âAnd the answer was, âYes!â,â there are many more than have turned into money sinks that have proven more difficult/impractical/etc than they ever appeared at first glance. Happily, though, PhyFawkesâ project is looking increasingly likely to fall into the former category than the latter.

As per their post on the r/SteamDeckModded subreddit, the SteamBoyâas the creation is calledâappears to be coming along very nicely indeed. The device puts the Steam Deck motherboard into a Gameboy form factor, which looks a good bit chonkier than my memory of the real thing. Thatâs probably more an issue with my memory though; in this demo video, PhyFawkes assures us itâs the same dimensions as the original Gameboy, i.e. 32mm, or just over an inch, thick.

Anyway, so far the mod has basically involved connecting up the buttons on the SteamBoy’s case to the actual Steam Deck’s inputs. The one part thatâs not working yet is the screenâwhich, as PhyFawkes writes, presents the biggest challenge. This is perhaps not surprising, given that the original Gameboy came with an LCD that displayedâcount âem, because you literally couldâ160 x 144 pixels in two-bit âcolor,â i.e. four shades of green. The SteamBoy version is a full color 1200 x 1080 display that was originally meant for use in VR headsets.

The most recent post on the topic, which was made over the weekend, explains that getting the screen working will require âa custom adapter PCB [printed circuit board] between the display and motherboard,â as well as modding the Steam Deckâs BIOS. The adapter is apparently required because the Steam Deckâs display output doesnât follow a standard pin layout, although thereâs some debate as to whether an entire custom PCB is required.

In the meantime, as the demo video demonstrates, the device can happily output video to an external monitor, which is something that a Gameboy absolutely could not do: indeed, the concept of doing so probably wouldnât have crossed anyoneâs mind in the heyday of the original device. What a time to be alive, and so on, and so forth.