Modders have been messing around with the Japanese version of the NES Classic Edition — the Famicom Mini — as much as they have with the North American one. One group, Kei Studio, performed what may be the coolest hack yet: installing the guts of Nintendo’s best-selling nostalgic hardware inside of a Game Boy, making the Famicom Mini even tinier.
The 25-minute video above breaks down how the Game Boy-style modification works, step by step. It’s in Japanese with English subtitles, so stateside fans hoping to recreate this for themselves may find this especially useful. For everyone else without Kei Studio’s level of crafting skills, it’s still quite something to see.
The end result of all that rewiring and re-casing is a very cool, handheld Famicom Mini, which has the same color scheme as its larger cousins. The so-called Famicom Pocket can even hook up to another machine for multiplayer, as to maintain the bigger Famicom Mini’s feature set.
We don’t spend a lot of time seeing system in action, relative to the amount spent on creating the thing. But there’s definitely a glimpse of the dubbed Famicom Pocket running Super Mario Bros., as well as hooked up to another system for some two-player Dr. Mario action. It’s awesome enough to make us wish that Nintendo would release the NES Classic Edition in this Game Boy-style form factor ... or at least encourage us to dig up our old handhelds.
