GB Boy Colour - Chinese Gameboy Color Clone

How do you fancy a backlit GameBoy Color? Let me introduce you to my new friend the GB Boy Colour! ~35 USD on AliExpress.

This is one of the more interesting bootleg consoles out there. It is basically a reverse engineered GameBoy Color, with the addition of a backlit screen!

If there was anything as a kid that troubled me with the GameBoy models, from the original to the first GBA, it was that you needed ambient light to see what's going on. Especially the color games on GBC and GBA looked chronically dull as it was almost impossible to get perfect illumination and a comfortable posture. There are some retrofit screens available for the original GBC and GBA, but it can be a somewhat risky procedure and it can be heartbreaking to risk ruining your beloved original.

The GB Boy Colour comes with 66 build-in original GameBoy games (not color games), which are loaded if you do not insert a game cartridge (or "game pak" as I believe its called in Nintendo language). Most of them are from the very beginning of the GameBoy era and not among my favourites, but since you can see through the plastic that the build-in games are actually loaded from a separate PCB, I got the idea of replacing them with a better selection of actual GBC games. I bought a 20-in-1 cartridge online with a wide selection of GBC games, but when I tested the cartridge before swapping it with the build-in games, I found out that most of the games cannot load on this device. The only games that worked were the ones which were original GameBoy games and not for GBC, though sometimes the GBC games gave a brief loading screen. All the games loaded fine on a GBA.

Through some research I found out that the GB Boy Colour also has issues using some everdrives (basically a GameBoy cartridge that can load games from an SD card). All original GameBoy and GBC cartridges load just fine, even a bootleg Pokemon cartridge played perfectly, so it seems like the problem is with loading GBC games from bootleg cartridges with multiple games on - perhaps because of power constraints due to the backlight? Also, if you plan on using the IR capability, you may be disappointed. While the GameBoy link port is there and working, the IR sensor/emitter on the GB Boy Colour is just a piece of dark colored plastic - I have no idea why they did not just omit it entirely.

Warioland 3 looks great. Click to zoom in and see the odd sub-pixel layout.

I decided to leave the built-in games as they were and tested Warioland 3 for GBC. It plays, sounds and looks really good. The only slight difference is that the screen ratio is not 100% like the original, so some rows of pixles are doubled resulting in a bit of a stretched image. The pixel doubling is however not very noticeable because the screen uses an RGB-GBR pixel layout instead of a standard RGB layout. To purists this is of course a downside, and I was a bit wary about it at first, but after a couple of hours of playtime, I must confess that it was only a mental problem and it made no difference when playing games at all. So while the screen is not perfect, it still looks great and the backlight is a big upgrade from the original. Original GameBoy games are even colorized like when playing them in a real GBC or GBA, and Pokemon Yellow has the same colors as on a GBC (it was a sort of hybrid game that both worked on the original GameBoy and with an extended color palette on GBC).

Illustration of how sub-pixels are organized in RGB-GBR

The buttons and the D-pad, while different from the originals, are solid and comfortable to play with. Even though the build quality is not like the original, it is by no means bad and the console feels solid and looks good. The three AA batteries are good for about 15+ hours (more if you play non-GBC games) which is pretty impressive. The original GBC lasts for about 25 hours if I remember correctly, but in turn it does not have a backlight like the GB Boy Colour. The only oddity I found regarding the power was that when the batteries are almost depleted, the game stops but the backlight stays on. Also if you turn off the console and quickly turn it on again, the console resumes the game rather than restarting it. It did not cause any problems, it is just a bit funny/odd.


Overall I am very happy with the GB Boy Colour. It plays original GameBoy and GBC games perfectly, and the backlit screen is a big advantage. You can get it in several different colours, and although it does have some minor quirks here and there, I find myself using it more than my original GameBoy consoles. If you do not have a GBA-SP, then definitely consider getting one of these.