I’ve complained that there aren’t enough buttons in cars anymore, but that’s not exactly what I meant. YouTube looper by name John Sutley he showed us how he got an original 1989 Game Boy in his car that doubles as a speedometer. It’s a bonafide, “why not?” a hacker project of sorts, and it’s incredibly poignant at a time when in-car screens are getting bigger and more distracting with each generation.
I haven’t had time to watch the 55-minute video because I have so much going on in my head, but it covers the process from childhood to execution. John spends most of the video walking through his process and explaining how he decided to connect the car to the Game Boy. His initial goal was to get the Game Boy to read the vehicle’s CAN bus system and display the mileage per hour on a 160 × 144 pixel dot matrix display. John had to design custom circuit boards for this project to bridge the CAN system and the Game Boy. The bridging process took months, but John came up with a form factor to slot into the slot for the Game Boy cartridge and then run a cable that connects to the car’s internal computer.
The final product is remarkably unpolished. It looks like a shabby device bursting at the seams with the panel completely exposed. It won’t replace those Android Auto/CarPlay external displays you can buy for your car, but it will provide some “geek” cred.
As he drove, John barely managed to capture a video of the glowing pea-green screen of the Game Boy. So he took the printed circuit board monster he made from the original Game Boy and tried it out in the late 90s Game Boy Pocket model instead. Its sharper black-and-white display can display the mileage a little better, giving John the credibility he needs after making the “the worst digital dash in the world.”
“The whole idea of using your Game Boy as a digital dashboard for your car is ridiculous,” John admits in his YouTube video. I’m glad he sees it for what it is. Although the final product is not very practical to drive around, the point is that this kind of hacking it can be done.