People have a lot of fun stuffing new things on old hardware and seeing how it'll run. Remember that time someone got .NET running on a NES? Anyway, it seems people are at it again with the retro tech by turning a Game Boy Color into a monitor. It turns out, it can handle games like Ultrakill and Doom Eternal if you don't mind the 2FPS slideshow.

Someone wired up a Game Boy Color as a media player

This cool feat was the idea of ChromaLock on YouTube, who documented their journey in a video. The ultimate goal was to stream video data to the Game Boy Color over a Link Cable, turning it into a monitor of sorts.

As you might imagine, it wasn't as easy as plugging the cable into a PC and calling it a day. ChromaLock had to work around the Link Cable itself, which could only transmit data at 512kHz. After some finagling over how to best represent a modern-day video on a Game Boy Color screen, he then deployed a Raspberry Pi Pico to act as a middle-man. The Pi would take in data from an external source and give it to the portable console in a format it could better understand.

This allowed ChromaLock to stream videos to their Game Boy, albeit it wasn't a pretty sight. Regular videos were viewable but pretty choppy, with a cut-down color palette to fit on the Game Boy. ChromeLock also tried playing Ultrakill and Doom Eternal on it, and while you could technically play them, the experience was pretty miserable.

Still, if you want to give it a try yourself and have some old hardware lying around, you can check out all the code on the project's GitHub page.