oh are you waiting on me
okay well you might think that this is some
kind of knockoff emulator handheld like an rk2020 or one of the raspberry pi
powered ones like the g pi or the pi boy but no
this is a real honest-to-goodness nintendo wii that can play wii games
gamecube games and more i built it
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g-boy is the brainchild of long-time console portabilizer g-man and it was
originally called the wee boy on his development blog the case is 3d printed by shapeways
using nylon powder and is roughly the size and shape of an og nintendo game
boy having finalized the project roughly halfway through 2019 it's now available
for purchase as a kit on hobbyist site bitbuilt to put it all together you'll
need obvious things like an original wii console and a microsd card to hold your
files but you'll also need a d-pad and face buttons from a nintendo ds lite two
18650 lithium-ion batteries just make sure you get these from a reputable
source to avoid counterfeits and some tools a temperature controlled soldering
iron and a rotary cutting tool are two absolute must-haves to make it work i
mean i guess you could use a saw instead of a dremel but
come on to make life easier here's a list of some other stuff you'll need
with the most important being the wire and the screwdriver an ifixit protect
tool kit can get your wii apart but isn't going to reach far enough to
assemble the gboy as i discovered early on you'll also need some time
about a day for a first time build and a lot of patience
my day started with some prep work which included soft modding a stock wii
console using letterbomb which allows it to run a homebrew software and setting
up bitbelt's bb loader which allows us to boot into a new home screen rather
than the nintendo default one then taking it all apart for some
physical modding as you might imagine
fitting one of these
into this involves more than just removing the motherboard from the wii
it actually needs to be cut in a pattern that's lovingly referred to as the omg
wtf trim yes my friends this
is literally all of the original motherboard i am going to keep there are
components mounted to the rest of the board like the real-time clock if you
want to play animal crossing and the bluetooth chipset if you want to connect a wiimote that will need to be harvested
and reattached if you wanted to do that but
that's a small price to pay time to get out the dremel
before assembly the edges had to be smoothed out in order to prevent anything from shorting
how do i do this you ask sandpaper
it's recommended to finish it with no lower than 600 grit and focus on
removing any copper on the edges by going in at an angle once that's done a
little desoldering and relocating components later and it's assembly time
ltdstore.com this is almost entirely just a matter of dropping things into
place and screwing them into the chassis there's a lot of wires that need
soldering and power needs to be attached to the correct pads and only those pads
or else you're looking at chopping up another wii bit belt recommends using
some extra lengths of wires impromptu cable ties to keep this mess under
control the final step is to install a safety thermistor that automatically
cuts power once the wii reaches 70 degrees
that's far short of dangerous thermals and the only time this should happen is
if it powers on in an enclosed space like a backpack or something like that
and there you go one portable wii let's take it for a
spin shall we and just like that here we are in an
open space with a Linus who is currently fascinated i can't
believe that this is all you actually need from the original
wii for it to function that's all the logic yep the RAM the soc
GPU i mean cognitively i know that yeah
you know yep okay yep there's the RAM there's the CPU
just the idea of chopping up a pcb of a device this
complex and then just kind of trying to find the right daughter points and
turn it into something like this is just unreal to me i love it well i mean the
wii is one of the more researched consoles out there as far as like more
modern machines go so it's not really that surprising that people are like hey
we only need you know this voltage from here and this voltage from there and
away you go you know so this is the kit that you use then yes
this is the g boy rev3 i want to try it yeah i'll go over here okay this is kind
of where i'm going to live for the rest of the video okay cool let's crack open
my copy of legend of zelda twilight princess
and uh
yeah now would be a good time to mention that you should probably rip your games
from the wii before you do the mod this thing's got no optical
okay this is so cool i mean the battery life can't be
very good though i haven't really tested the battery life i think it's a couple
of hours like it's not amazing but so it's like the game boy
experience in more ways than one kind of wish the screen was a little
better than this but uh that's the screen that comes with it i think if you
really had a mind too there are probably some ips displays that have like
independent brightness controls and all that kind of stuff the menu where you
were on is called bb loader and that was created especially for this kind of
device like a portable device that doesn't necessarily have
uh shall we say uh motion controls built in right
so they were cut off yeah i don't remember if i put the
bluetooth module back in that so pairing a wiimote is gonna be hit or
miss the sound is surprisingly good even if
the screen ain't great uh yeah if you wanted to uh turn the
volume up you should just be able to hold the y button and the z button and
press up on the d-pad yeah sorry is the z rear
z uh rear right but it's above the trigger
oh
okay it distorts a little but that's fine it was already very loud before
that yeah the amplifier circuit i think uh kind of goes a little bit too hot for
those speakers yeah if you put it too high but you know that's how you know
that's how you know it's good link a nope
this is crazy yeah it's not an emulator it's straight
up playing the game like what
fun fact twilight princess is reversed on the wii versus gamecube i did know
that because link is left-handed yep whereas the majority of the population
is right-handed i don't know where the horse is
one thing that you do lose with a control setup like this is analog
triggers so those are just straight up digital
but of course if you just wanted to play wii games on the go there are
maybe less legal well i don't know i mean does this
the fact that i'm running okay so i'm running ripped software but
on nintendo's own hardware what is nintendo's take on this i think
nintendo's take is you need to buy it again you got to buy it again but this is my
hardware right that's your hardware but you only have a license to run that game
on that disk on that disk whereas you know there are laws that say that format
shifting is a thing that you can do nintendo doesn't necessarily agree with
that nintendo doesn't agree okay so then you know since we're doing something
nintendo doesn't approve of anyway here there's definitely ways that you can
more easily and more cheaply play wii games on the go so this is going to have
to justify its existence in some other ways fortunately it is homebrewable
af so why don't we go back to that launcher and have a look at what else we've got on here just power it off and
back on again oh is that the only way i don't know if it's the only way but
there's not a whole lot of documentation on the like button shortcuts does it
have like an ac plug-in so that you can
uh just run it not on batteries oh i guess it's got type c yeah oh that is so
cool and when the unit is off type c actually automatically switches it over
to the internal storage so you can just connect it up to your pc and browse the
files this just blows my mind okay
so right now i only see gamecube games okay if you use the right stick yeah
that'll bring up a radial menu so you can choose wii games uh the hbc
logo is for homebrew channel games which would be things like snes emulator and a
few other things uh i think this early version of the
software doesn't currently support running weware titles and virtual
console but that is something that's going to be coming okay so virtual
console okay so that's gamecube games for some
reason uh yeah the virtual console menu doesn't work so it'll just keep you where you
are i see okay what about wii games wii games don't work oh hey there we go wii games
do work wow sick
so like yeah mario kart wii suckas this
uses a compatibility layer slash hack called
hedra which allows it to actually emulate the
wiimote so you don't have to worry about having to
hook up an external wiimote you can use the sticks actually not crazy worm
no it shouldn't get that hot well i don't know i mean it's a
home it's a living room console like i i didn't i've never given much thought to
how much heat it outputs well the full unit only really has a
tiny little heat sink and fan on it yeah i guess
that's all we got on there now nah i missed
okay no
come on so lame
who blue shells you right before the finish line bad people that's who
mario you piece of human garbage
well we all know and have known forever that the ai cheats in mario kart yeah
just like oh stop
all right yes i reigned supreme
so how's the experience with wii games great
perfect yeah the fact that it's actually a good experience is the result of quite
a lot of community effort it's not just gman i believe um
some of the pcbs that were custom built were made by aurelio
on the bit built forums and there are several others who contributed um all
kinds of research and time and effort into all of this
so it's really a very team effort kind of
thing it was just all kind of put together by gman
9x gx is the super nintendo emulator that you can use in lieu of virtual
console which currently doesn't work sick
most of these menus don't do anything yeah this is really early software got
it they just released it back in june okay
got it yeah so it's nest nine and next gx
holy smokes this is it this is everything
okay what i need to know though is
super mario world does it actually run well
i have my doubts love this 4x3 display
well yeah i have my doubts because like getting the latency good is
something i've seen a lot of people screw up
there would be more latency with a wiimote though okay we're going to try
it we're going to try playing super mario world with a
analog stick i've never actually done this before and it feels a little bit
a little spongy
i guess the nintendo ds light had kind of spongy buttons anyway didn't it it's
hard to play super mario world on anything other than a snazz controller especially if you're
used to that sort of thing like to be clear it's not like i'm
missing my jumps and stuff here
but these yeah these buttons are really not they're really really not great that
may be a side effect of the 3d printed shell maybe some sanding would help with that
what other consoles can you run emulated games for uh
well anything that has a wii emulator for it so
dosbox is available scum vm so like old lucasfilm or lucasarts games
uh psychogenesis regular nintendo uh
there's an n64 emulator that's sorta okay
uh what else gpa
regular game boy game gear master system
okay so yeah the the wii is actually a really
good like retro console emulating emulating system why this over someone
like one of those super portable pcs well i mean there's the simplicity of
the interface for one and two i mean
did you build that super portable pc okay that's fair
oh no oh wow that was some hardcore slowdown
right there yeah this
this d-pad leaves a lot to be desired
it's starting to heat up a little bit too i can feel it
the good thing about the d-pad and the buttons and everything like that that's all stuff that you can swap out yourself
so you can get different rubber membranes you can get different
you know d-pad face buttons that kind of stuff
if you really didn't like it ah no not the big crushing things i
thought these were swamps for the longest time because i was a little kid and i
couldn't actually like get very far in the game
and uh like i read the manual obsessively remember when like reading
the game manual was as much fun as playing the game i used to do it in the
car all the time oh yeah it's not that heavy no
oh well there's your cooling problem we have tape over the vent
come on boys let's give it some breathing room
there we go and look if i get straight onto the
camera that actually gives you guys a better look at what it looks like if
you're straight onto it it's not that bad
no yoshi
very cool i don't know that i would personally put the time and effort into
building one of these versus like you know using a um a gpd type
device or something like that instead but
there is absolutely nothing else like it
and look at that it's got a headphone jack
at 325 plus the cost of batteries sd
card face buttons and a wii this project
is not for the faint of heart it's really less of a practical thing
and more of a passion project sort of like building a ship in a bottle except
you actually get to play with it in the end are there more capable portable consoles
out there for a lot less absolutely
but you didn't build it did you thanks lg for sponsoring today's video
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watching guys if you're looking for something less diy and more
diy why not check out our recent cardboard case challenge i swear it's a
lot more fun than it sounds and also let us know if you want to see more videos
like this that are a little bit more i don't know diy project d
it's kind of a different video for the channel