German Physicist Makes GTA 5 Playable on Game Boy Using Streaming
-
Loading... - Harper Cooper
- 31 Jan 2022
- 431 Views
- 1 Like
- 0 Comment
A German physicist has found a way to make Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 5 playable on a 1989 Nintendo Game Boy through the use of a custom-built streaming cartridge.
As spotted by GamesRadar, Sebastian Staacks, a physicist and drummer from Germany, has managed to play GTA V on a Game Boy by using a WiFi cartridge to stream the game. As explained by Staacks on YouTube, the game itself doesn't run on the Game Boy itself, that would be practically impossible:
"I am playing GTA 5 on the Game Boy," says Staacks in the video. "But it's not running on the Game Boy. The game is rendered on my PlayStation and then streamed to the Game Boy via WiFi. Conversely, if I press a button on the Game Boy, the input is sent back to the PlayStation so I can control the game."
While streaming games from one device to another wouldn't typically be cause for celebration, Staacks' efforts are certainly impressive given the nature of the technology he's working with. In order to bring GTA's 3D moving images over to the device, Staacks had to find a workaround for bringing an HD game to the Game Boy's 160x144 resolution screen. To do so, the developer's solution remaps images from the game and pieces them back together as tiles of pixels. For a full description detailing how Staacks overcame this problem, you can check out the full rundown on his YouTube channel.
Once Staacks had figured out exactly how to overcome streaming the game's video imagery onto the device and found a way to transfer that data at an acceptable speed, he had a cartridge capable of streaming Grand Theft Auto 5 (and virtually any other video) from modern hardware to the handheld at around 20 frames per second. Read More…
