GameBoy Advance Streams Movies, Shows via Special Cartridges

GameBoy Advance, the classical Nintendo handheld gaming console, could now stream movies and TV shows by using special modded cartridges.

In this day and age, gaming consoles, such as the Xbox Series S/X, the PlayStation or PS5, and the Nintendo Switch, have become powerful enough to do things other than playing games. It now also allows its users to connect to the internet to stream videos and connect with other people--among other stuff.

GameBoy Advance Streams Movies, Shows

However, as per the news story by Gizmodo, the Nintendo Game Boy, which was released more than three decades ago, did not sport a powerful processor that could stream HD videos.

But still, it never stopped someone from making video streaming possible for the classical and iconic handheld console from Nintendo.

To do so, a Game Boy Advance owner that goes by the name Sebastian Staacks found a way to allow it to play video without upgrading the processing power of the dated gaming device.

Although, according to ScreenRant, the Nintendo GameBoy Advance was ahead of its time during its debut, it still lacks power by the standards of the devices today.

The Game Boy, unlike the powerful gaming consoles today, only features a Sharp LR35902 processor, which only runs at 4.19 MHz. Gizmodo noted in the same report that even our smartphones are already running at GHz.

As such, the processor of the Game Boy Advance is not actually powerful enough to run full-blown TV shows and movies to begin with.

Game Boy Advance Streaming

It is worth noting that the same guy also previously modded a Game Boy cartridge to provide WiFi connectivity to the handheld console by stuffing a wireless ESP8266 microchip.

This time around, Staacks once again modified the cartridge for the classic gaming console to play videos, such as full-blown movies and TV series episodes.

By using the modded Game Boy cartridge, Staacks was able to run "Shrek" movies and even some episodes of "Spongebob Squarepants."

However, as expected with the low-powered processor of the classic console, the picture quality is not 4K, not even 360p.

Instead, the resolution of the TV shows and movies were only limited to 240x160, at least for the animated ones like Spongebob. However, it is to note that it even gets lower for live-action movies from the "Star Wars" franchise.

Not to mention that the Game Boy Advance also played these videos on a grayscale screen, which does not give justice even to the animated shows and movies.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Teejay Boris