Retro gaming is all the rage right now and the folks at Hyperkin really push the envelope. From NES, SNES, Genesis/Mega Drive, Master System, Famicom, Super Famicom and other systems Hyperkin has continued to develop amazing pieces of tech. One such amazing piece of tech started as an April Fools gag, and I’m of course talking about the Smartboy.
The Smartboy attaches to an Android-powered phone equipped with a USB-C port and allows you to play physical Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges directly on your phone. While you can play these games on your phone you do not play the cartridge itself. The Smartboy borrows inspiration from Hyperkin’s own Retron 5 system as the cartridge has its ROM dumped onto local memory on your smartphone. This process works decently, however the load time can vary depending on the size of the game itself. It is for this very reason that the Smartboy ONLY plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, Game Boy Advanced games were deemed too large and took too long to download the ROM to the phone. This, to some, can limit the appeal of the Smartboy.
Once you have downloaded the 2 free apps and connect the cartridge the Smartboy does a good job playing games. There is a little bit of latency added with the Smartboy, odd for a device which connects physically to your phone via USB-C. Here’s the thing, USB-C is faster than Micro USB and a physical connection should be faster than Bluetooth. On some games this caused more issues than others, most noticeably playing platformers.
Overall the Smartboy played everything I threw at it except for Donkey Kong Country. We’ve reached out to Hyperkin and they have acknowledged that the Smartboy doesn’t have 100% game compatibility as the hardware depends on 3rd party software, namely the MyOldBoy! app. This is one instance where having software developed separately truly hurt the performance of the hardware.
At $50 the Smartboy is an inexpensive novelty. My issue comes from being able to buy the real hardware with 100% game compatibility for under $30. If the Smartboy had better compatibility, better latency and the software was less of an afterthought I could possibly recommend trying it. But for right now it doesn’t feel like the Smartboy is ready for primetime and it cannot replace my Gameboy Advance SP for portable gaming. I hope Hyperkin continues to work on development as there’s a lot of potential here, but people don’t buy potential; they buy finished product.
Why it RoX:
Has an “Oh wow” factor when you see it
They actually did it
Allows you to play physical cartridges on your smart phone
Amazing sound and video quality
Replaces crappy touch screen controls with decent feeling physical controls
What could be improved
While the hardware is nice the software feels like an afterthought
You can’t see all the on-screen options on the MyOldBoy! App, leaving the user to guess at selections.
USB-C and Android only limits market penetration
Load times on GBC games can be loooooooong
No support for GBA
No official emulation support
You can get the real hardware for less
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