LEGO released an official Game Boy set earlier this week - a surprisingly faithful recreation of Nintendo's old handheld console. It's got everything the old console had, except the ability to take cartridges and play games. Obviously. Because it's LEGO.
...Right? You'd never be able to run Game Boy titles on a 2x2 plastic brick.
Turns out, it's actually possible! Just, not officially. A modder by the name of Natalie the Nerd had an idea for teaching a new dog old tricks: sure, plastic bricks can't run code, but can you hide enough hardware inside the set to make it just as usable as the real thing?
Building A Playable LEGO Game Boy
Taking this excursion to her blog, Natalie used pre-release images of the LEGO set to try and figure out how much space there was to work with inside the thing.
This kind of planning could only go so far, as the set's internals were still a mystery. But with the size of lego bricks as a well-known quantity, sketching things out was still very possible.
Removing parts was definitely on the table. It'd have to be to fit the hardware. But going too...
