If you’ve got a bunch of Gameboy and Gameboy Advance cartridges lying around and a Steam Deck (I’m jealous), you might be in luck if you’re looking to bring the two together.
Epilogue is a tech company that, back in 2021, released a nifty little gadget called the GB Operator, which when connected to a computer can run any Gameboy, Gameboy Colour and Gameboy Advance game through their own homebrew emulator.
The really neat thing is that while you can play the game through the emulator, you can also save your progress and have that progress stay on the cartridge meaning that if you decide to go back to an official console, you won’t lose any progress.
The Epilogue GB Operator and Studio can also be used to easily write homebrew games onto physical cartridges too, meaning it’s a good way for indie developers dabbling in demakes and retro-style games to simply make physical copies of them.
This gadget was released in 2021, so why the hell am I talking about it now? WELL! Epilogue themselves posted an update on their Twitter announcing that after much testing, the GB Operator and Operator app are “fully compatible with Steam OS” with Gameboy games able to run “impeccably” on the Steam Deck.
It’s official – enjoy your childhood cartridges, now on SteamDeck! Today we validated at the office that GB Operator and the Operator app are fully compatible with Steam OS and run impeccably on SteamDeck. This makes the experience fun and portable, we’re happy to support it 💪🏻 pic.twitter.com/Ik4Pc6xPny
— Epilogue (@meet_epilogue) October 13, 2022
So get this, folks: those little games that you could play as a kid on the go? You can now play them on the go again. But this time? It’s on something bigger and bustier.
While there is something inherently funny about making something that was already portable once again portable but with a different flavour, this is still pretty neat. While still portable like they literally always were, your old Gameboy games can also now be played on a reasonably larger screen thanks to the GB Operator.
The Steam Deck’s emulation capabilities continue to expand here, which is very cool to see. From this to the ability to recreate the experience of playing WiiU and 3DS in probably the most accurate way to date, it’s clear that the Steam Deck is becoming the most flexible console out there.
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