The Super Retro Boy from Retro-Bit (it’s not on their site yet) is yet another reason that Nintendo should re-release the GBA. Retro Bit have done a brain fart and bundled the GBA hardware into an original Game Boy shell, whilst doing away with the shoulder buttons. The machine is lovely to look at, it’s obviously as close to cloning the Game Boy shell as they can get away with, and it looks beautiful – but try playing Mario Kart or F-Zero with shoulder buttons tacked on the front and you’ll soon be hurling the damn thing at the wall.
This machine takes cartridges from the GBA, GB and GBC so it seems it’s based on orginal GBA hardware, though whether or not it’s actually a hardware clone or just an emulator is yet unknown. £10 says it’s an emulator, but that’s not the end of the world. The shoulder buttons though, god damn it man.
This thing is going to cost about $80 when it’s released but you can count me out. I hope that the success of the Nes Mini has got the cogs whirring at Nintendo HQ though… if they re-released the original GBA in a host of new colours and with a beautiful bright LCD, WiFi and access to a store to buy ROMs and SNES ports that never made it to GBA I would snap one up in an instant.
The below images are from theverge.
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