Game Boy Advance hardware mod makes your games look great on a HDTV

I have many fond memories of the Game Boy Advance (which for some reason isn’t called the Game Boy Advanced), but legally getting the entirety of my GBA collection playing on an HDTV is a huge pain. Not anymore!

A YouTuber by the name of Stephen ‘Woozle’ Williams has been working on an FPGA hardware mod that reconstructs the native 160p images of the GBA in 720p on your TV with no input lag. The games look wonderful and it’s all thanks to this device which Woozle has named the “GBAConsolizer.”

The Consolizer supports numerous scaling and smoothing options for users. There are your traditional “Zoom” modes boosting the size of the picture: you can choose from 4x and 5x nearest neighbor scaling as well as a 4.5 bilinear scaling option.

If you want to use your GBA portably after installing the mod, well, tough luck. The solution here completely replaces the original system’s LCD with the adapter rendering it completely useless as a portable device… unless you want to play games without being able to see anything. However, the device does have a port to plug in a SNES controller for using it as a console.

Right now, Woozle has 100 versions of the Consolizer made which are currently being sold through a lottery system to determine who gets to buy one. They’re quite a hot item that many retro YouTubers and retro enthusiasts will want to get their hands on rather quickly.

@Woozle64 #GBAConsolizer update:
Lottery is over and names have already been drawn and emails sent!
I didn't think it was necessary to do a vid of drawing 100 names and it took less effort than I thought to get it all done, so it's done…
Stay tuned for the next pre order!

— GameTechUS (@GameTechUS) November 25, 2018

One day we’ll hopefully see GBA games arrive on the Nintendo Switch, but that might take a long while knowing Nintendo. For now, solutions like this are great and offer innovative new takes on old hardware. They’re impressive to see and I can’t wait to see more in the future.

Source: Kotaku