Way back, even longer than I can remember, maybe because i am getting old - anyway, way back a guy who went by the name Bunnyboy, or in real life Brian Parker, created some of the most ground breaking gadgets and reproductions for the Nintendo Entertainment System - I guess this guy is to blame, or praise for where we are now, because he did some amazing work that I am confident that he inspired others to do better or more. 

Anyway, one of his creations was the RetroVision, an original "DMG" Gameboy crammed into an NES cartridge. To make the Gameboy show content on the NES, he had created a custom board to show just that. There was one, if I may say - problem, your NES had to have an audio resistor mod to be able to play sound. If you did not have such, you could always use the original speaker jack on the Gameboy board, in fact the Frankenstein of a NES cart even had all the ports available, meaning it could work with the Gameboy printer or you could hook the RetroVision up to a link cable and play against someone else. 

It did have some "flaws" though, besides the needed audio mod, you would also have to remove the metal bar in your original NES, or the RetroVision would not fit.

The RetroVision was quite costly, carrying a hefty $125 price tag, but keep in mind that an original Gameboy had to be donated to every RetroVision made. It was a time consuming task to make them and shortly after it made its appearance, the RetroVision went"Temporarily Unavailable" on Brian's RetroZone (RetroUSB) website, until it was pulled from the website.

In my opinion it was an awesome piece of work that I sadly never got to own back then, I was too slow with my order I guess. And with that said, no I have not forgotten all about the Biederman Gameboy Adapter for the NES that was being teased back in the 90's, supposedly to be released by Camerica, but I don't think anyone knows if that thing actually ever existed or was merely a mockup of wishful thinking.

So, fast forward to 2025 - I was on vacation with my family and while I was killing a bit of time, on my phone, I decided to browse around on Aliexpress, and.... and.... HOLD ON!!.... HOOOOLD ON!!!...

Someone had created a Famicom RetroVision, or so they claimed it was. Unfortunately a NES version was not available, so I would have to settle with a Famicom version. It was advertised as being in a random shell color, and it arrived in a nice teal'ish color, but with no label even though it was advertised with one, no manual, nothing, just the cartridge.

The first thing I did was of course to open up the cart, while I surely am no electronics "nerd", I just had to see what as inside, especially as it looked nothing like the RetroVision by Brian.

So again, I am no in way that knowledgeable about electronics, but here we have an FPGA (EF2L15LG100B), 8mbit flash memorty (AM29F080B), 3 x 64kb SRAM (LY6264SL), a databus chip? (LJ245A), voltage regulator? (AMS1117) and some other bits and pieces I was not able to figure out, but last but not least, we now see that this cartridge was indeed also frankensteined, the biggest chip on the board is an SGB-CPU, the brains of the Super Gameboy adapter, for the Super Nintendo.

The price for the Famicom Gameboy Adapter is around $85 incl. shipping, so it's quite pricey, but take into account that a Super Gameboy has to be buthered to make one of these, I am not sure I am a fan, but oh well.

Now on to the next struggle, even though I have been collecting for ages, I actually do not own an original Famicom, no really, so I may end up having some problems during my test. 

Unfortunately I no longer have hardware capable of giving me some proper screenshots, this is as good as it gets, but it's just to give you an idea of what the visuals look like.

So the cartridge does not come with any manual and since my copy did not come with the label either, which seems to have a quick guide, I managed to find an aliexpress item post which included a short "how to use" guide.

Change color palette:
Press and hold "SELECT" and "D-Pad UP" to change game color palette, I forgot how many there is, but there is a lot.

Change screen brightness:
Press and hold "SELECT" and "D-Pad LEFT" to change game screen brightness.

And that is pretty much all there is to usage guide for the Famicom Gameboy Adapter. The listing I found also made an effort to let buyers know that this will work on any original system without any modifications, that it might not work as intended on clones.

That is excatly what happened to me when trying out the cart in my older NES clone. The cartridge boots, the Gameboy game plays nice and there is not a not of latency if any. But one major problem I've experienced on my clone is the lack of sound, sadly.

But other than that the adapter works really well. It has a generic border looking like an original "DMG" Gameboy, and while I did mention that the cartridge contains the Super Gameboy CPU, it does not mean that Super Gameboy "exhanced" cartridges will not show the border contained on the cartridge.

With that said, this cart will only play games intended for play on the original Gameboy, some Gameboy Color carts will work if they have support for the original Gameboy - most likely the older "black carts" and not the newer clear case Gameboy Color carts. 

All in all a very nice gimmick, the Famicom Gameboy Adapter, but it's not really much more than that. Today we have so many options to play Gameboy games on the big screen, being emulators, various aftermarket consoles with Gameboy support and so on. I love that someone put in the effort to make this, but it is worth the pricetag? Probably not and it's honstly an unnecesseary gadget, but i love the fact that it exists.