by If you have children or friends with kids, there's a chance you might have seen the Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Lil' Gamer before.
Designed to look like a baby-ified version of Nintendo's classic Game Boy handheld, it is a sensory toy that plays sounds and music, but isn't really designed to do anything more complex than that, with the "screen" essentially showing a static picture.
For its intended audience, this is, of course, all well and good, with the handheld essentially serving as a way for parents to subtly condition their kids to like the same hobbies as they do and to prepare them for the real thing. But what's interesting is that these same limitations have also attracted another, slightly more left-field audience: modders who have accepted the challenge of turning it into a functional handheld device.
To give an example, last year, I remember hearing about an individual named Mark Ghirardi — better known as Marky Pi — who added a Raspberry Pi board and a new screen to the device to get it to play games like The Simpsons: Road Rage and Turtles In Time, and it seems that since then another modder, named KOUZEX, has embarked on a similar journey.
Instead of using a Raspberry Pi board, however, KOUZEX has decided to take a completely different approach, attempting to cram an original Game Boy Color motherboard into the children's toy and wire up the buttons to replace the Game Boy's.
This build is the subject of a brand-new video he posted earlier today, in which the modder shares all the ins and outs of cutting the board to fit within its new bright blue exterior, soldering the two boards together, and connecting the AMOLED screen selected to serve as a replacement for his "beat-up" Game Boy Color screen; that's in addition to throwing in a new USB-C port for charging.
The final result isn't exactly the prettiest, with KOUZEX disguising some of the rough edges with stickers and a cover piece on the cartridge slot, but what matters is that it works.
To demonstrate this, the modder shows off Pokémon Crystal and Grand Theft Auto running on the device, using their original cartridges.
You can watch the full video above.