Gadgetory

today's video is sponsored by audible the signature defining feature of the Nintendo switch is its ability to go between being a portable handheld system or an at-home big-screen TV gaming console but this isn't the first time Nintendo's actually messed with this idea they had a similar concept way back in the 90s which brought handheld gaming to your TV with the super Gameboy the super Gameboy was the first will publicly at least made available way for people to take handheld games from the original Gameboy and put them on a Super Nintendo system using this little cart attachment right here now this looks just like a regular Super Nintendo cart but inside is actually a lot of the same guts as a Game Boy which run the games on the cart and put them on your TV that's important oat that this only plays the same games as the original Gameboy meaning you can do regular Game Boy games certain very specific Game Boy Color games that could run on old systems and surprisingly even the Game Boy camera but anything beyond that point that was Game Boy Color dedicated will not run on this now well I've had those limitations there's what's still actually a little more powerful than a traditional Game Boy and so it could leverage that strength and a couple different ways for you to the games first off obviously the Game Boy style screen is not their same dimensions as what you have on a TV so it would add a border line around it which for some titles would just be a generic Gameboy one but for a lot of more popular titles like Pokemon you can get dedicated unique borders going around it in other cases there were some games that even offered actual performance upgrades although oftentimes something very specific or minut for instance a few different titles would have improved audio files offering sound effects and music quality that wouldn't normally be possible with a traditional Gameboy it's also interesting note that because this was a little more powerful a lot of games also ran ever so slightly faster on the super Gameboy than they would on a normal one you wouldn't be able to notice it normally but side by side there is just that slight increase in speed now this one we have here is the original super Gameboy and it's the only one that made its way to the US there is however a super Gameboy 2 that was released only in Japan that featured a much fancier looking clear kart it offered a couple of different changes one of which was that did run games at the exact same speed as a Game Boy instead of the slightly increased like this one but by far the most interesting feature of that one is it allows you to connect a game link cable so you could do multiplayer game boy stuff which you cannot do with this one before moving on I want to take a second to think today's sponsor audible for making this video possible get your first audiobook free when you try audible for 30 days by visiting audible.com slash Kevin Kenton or texting Kevin Kenson 2 500 500 audible is the place to get your audiobook fixed they have an incredible number of different audio books to choose from as a member you get one credit every month to get one of your choice along with two audible originals exclusive audio books from celebrated authors that you can't find anywhere else right now I'm listening to blood sweat and pixels an audio book that's compilation of interviews with the developers behind some of my favorite games like pillars of eternity and shovelknight giving a really in-depth look behind what the game dev experience is really like make sure to check it out and give audible a try by visiting audible.com slash Kevin Kenton or texting Kevin Kenton to 500 500 now the Superboy is not the only system from this time that messed with the concept of bridging the gap between portable and TV games for instance something we've talked about before is the Sega Nomad a sega system that instead of bringing portable games to tv's brought TV games to handhelds allowing you to play sega genesis games on the go and even supported an AV out so you could still play on TV which is really close to the concept of a switch when it comes to nintendo the super Gameboy isn't the only example of this either by the way was the first one made publicly be able to be a retail but before that they actually had another peripheral called the wide boy made for the Famicom in Japan that allowed people to use the gameboy games on the Famicom the whole goal of this was that so developers had a way to test and mess with games and see them on a large screen instead of having to constantly strain their eyes looking at a tiny gameboy screen all the time after the super Gameboy there were a couple of other peripherals that kind of walked that line as well the n64 had the wide boy 64 again something not made publicly available but it was also used by members of the media to give them a way to capture footage or screenshots of games and there was a very limited option for n64 in the form of the transfer pack something that was used specifically from a Pokemon Stadium that would allow players to also play specific Pokemon games on their n64 now the last peripheral of this style that Nintendo actually released was the Gameboy player now this one was another one for retail and it was designed for the Gamecube plug the new Gameboy player in your GameCube it was really interesting because it actually had an attachment that went on the bottom of the system allowing you to plug in a gameboy games including all the way up to Game Boy Advance and then you had to play an actual specific disc in the Gamecube to make it work fun fact because of this two-part system if you look for these on eBay right now the attachment alone is only about 20 bucks but if you want the disk it's actually a lot more because people kept losing them or breaking them the full combo can go easily over a hundred bucks another fun fact about the super Gameboy is that since it is basically just a Super Nintendo card it'll work with anything that runs Super Nintendo games for instance if you want a really ridiculous round by way of playing gameboy games on a larger screen than a regular Gameboy you can use it with a super boy or you can use it with a super analogue NT to play on a modern TV so to demonstrate actually working we right now have it booted up with pokemon red and since that is one of those games that was kind of the midpoint between the original Gameboy and the Game Boy Color you get some little additional effects on the super Gameboy namely there's actually some different color options so we can even open up a settings menu and in there we can do things like change what colors we want to get the game to be displayed in or we can change the different border lines in fact pokemon is one of the handful of titles that actually has its own unique border but if we wanted to we could change it to one of the more traditional ones like the Gameboy surrounding screen or just a bunch of cats being lazy so with this setup we are able to just play old school original Game Boy games featuring a little bit extra color in this case and play it just like a home console game on Super Nintendo and it surprisingly looks really really good and what's interesting about this too is how for its time this gave you the ability to switch between the two methods however you like just like now with the switch I mean the way the switch does it is this one unit that you know either connects to a TV or has it on its own in other cases like with Sony there's things where cloud saves you're uploading downloading those in the case of this everything is saved right on the card itself so everything you do in Pokemon here on the super Gameboy you just put that same card in your Gameboy and you're good to go and really when you look at something like this you kind of realized this might actually be the starting point or even the inspiration for Nintendo to explore the concept of switching between two methods because they've done it before it's just nowadays you have the awesome idea of bringing the console experience into a convenient handheld as opposed to taking little GBA graphics and putting them on a big old TV