The Game Boy family of handheld consoles was groundbreaking, making gaming more accessible to millions worldwide. Nintendo’s portables beat off technologically superior competition from the likes of Sega’s Game Gear and Atari’s Lynx. They became home to foundational moments for the medium, from what is still arguably the definitive version of Tetris to the birth of Pokémon. Yet with the iconic gray monolith launching in 1989, it’s now pushing 40—and playing those important classics gets tougher every year.
If you have a collection of original, physical Game Boy cartridges in 2026, you essentially have two options. One is to hope your original console still works—a Game Boy Advance is best here, being a comparatively fresh-faced 25 years old with backward compatibility for original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges. The other is to pick up a third-party field-programmable gate array (FPGA) console, like the Analogue Pocket, which also offers broad compatibility with all original carts. However, the former is victim to the ravages of time, with fewer functioning units available as the years march on, while the latter is a pricier investment tailored to hardcore collectors.
Enter option three: Epilogue’s GB Operator, a way to play original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges, directly on your computer, for a penny less than $50.
Emulation Nation
Photograph: Matt Kamen
The GB Operator is billed as “a cartridge slot for your computer,” and rarely has a tech product been so accurately described. Unpack it, and you’ll find an unassuming translucent cuboid, a circuit board in a perspex box, the slot itself the only indication that something interesting is going on here. It measures a positively pocketable 1.3 × 1.2 × 3.5 inches and weighs a negligible 1.5 ounces. Setup is a breeze: Just plug it into your computer with the included USB-C cable, which also provides power, install the Playback software (available for PC, Mac, and Linux), and … that’s it.