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GAME BOY EXCHANGER FEATURE - September 1999

Elsewhere in this month’s games section we praise the Nintendo Game Boy’s library of 1000-odd different games, but if you think about it, what’s so great about that? You’re probably saying "Even if I had the money to spend 20 grand on Game Boy games, I could hardly carry hundreds of them around with me at a time unless I had a giant wheelbarrow, and quite apart from being a pain in the arse that doesn’t fit in very well with the machine’s ‘go-anywhere’ ethos, now does it? You idiots."

Except, of course, you’d be looking pretty stupid by now if you’d said that (and let’s face it, you’d never have said "ethos" anyway), because now there’s a device that lets you do exactly that. The Game Boy Xchanger is a diddy little blue gadget that plugs into your PC and enables you to cram up to 250-odd of your existing GB games onto a single cartridge the same size as an ordinary one. It works with old mono games and the fancy new colour ones alike (you can mix and match the two types, although the colour ones are a lot bigger and you won’t get nearly as many of them on a cartridge at once), you can change the games over as many times as you want (writing a new cartridge is as easy as falling off a log and takes about a minute), and you get to select your games from an easy-to-use menu once they’re on there. The Xchanger even supports games which save your progress into the cart’s memory as you go along, like Zelda, and you can also use it to run free home-made games created by bedroom GB programmers, including brilliant versions of old Spectrum classics like Jet Set Willy and Jetpac.

The device is perfectly legal (although one of the reasons for its popularity is that it also lets you put commercial GB games downloaded from the Internet onto the cart, which entirely isn’t legal), and it’s even cheap, at just £25. (Blank cartridges come in various sizes, from £20 up to £60 for the biggest.) The GB Xchanger is a modern miracle of miniaturisation, and it’ll give your Game Boy or Game Boy Color a whole new lease of life.

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