GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
When I haul my 27-inch desktop monitor into the garage to film fun gadget videos… or want to play Japanese SNES games with friends… or lose the AC adapter for my old external hard disk… I can now power them with a USB battery instead.
None of them came with USB-C ports; the entire USB protocol was barely a twinkle in its creator’s eye when Nintendo shipped the Super Famicom in 1990! But a tiny programmable dongle, from a company called Werewolf, can transform old power ports to accept USB-C electricity. I’m so impressed, I just bought a second kit for a friend’s birthday.
With these dongles, there’s no surgery required to add USB-C. You plug the $8 Werewolf VFLEX dongle into your phone to program it, plug it into your USB charger or battery, then attach a $4 barrel jack tip.
It’s like having a universal A/C adapter, one you don’t even need to plug into the wall, because modern USB-C batteries offer far more power than yesteryear’s gadgets did.
Here’s my Asus monitor, my Super Famicom, and a cheap RCA-to-HDMI adapter all powered by a single Shargeek 300 portable battery and two VFLEX adapters:
Yes, Mega Man X would look better on my CRT, but it doesn’t have a barrel jack. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
At its current rate of drain (2W for the game, 24W for the monitor, and less than 1W for HDMI), that big battery will last hours this way. With my wife’s original 1989 Game Boy, which I measured draining just 0.33 watts playing Tetris, even my pocket battery could theoretically power it for over 90 hours straight.
I have non-theoretical examples, too: When I held a classic gaming party on the Fourth of July, I genuinely powered this Super Famicom with a VFLEX for some five-player Bomberman.
... continue reading