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I love my Steam Deck. Although the internals are starting to look a bit long in the tooth these days, it still feels like the archetype of what a handheld gaming PC should be. It’s a bit large and in charge though, which is why my ears pricked up when I heard of the Steam Boy.
This custom Steam Deck re-imagining is the work of Reddit user PhyFawkes, and the thinking behind it amounts to this: “The Steam Deck motherboard seems pretty small. I wonder if you could make a Steam Deck the size of a Game Boy?”
Turns out, for the most part, you can (via Tom’s Hardware). The chassis amounts to a 3D-printed PETG shell, which manages to squeeze in not just the Steam Deck’s relatively miniature mobo (complete with APU heatsink and fans), but also its rather sizable battery.
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PhyFawkes has also tucked the Deck’s internal speakers within the frame, alongside the separate audio board and some creative placement of ribbon cables. All this hardware hasn’t left a whole lot of room for controls, though, which have been reduced to a D-pad, four traditional face buttons (alongside two system buttons), one thumbstick, and one touchpad.
That’s some pretty tidy work, though—especially when you see the Steam Boy next to an original Steam Deck. In terms of footprint, it’s well under half the size. The hardware is stacked, Tetris-style, within the frame, so it’s a fair bit chonkier.
Still, you could reasonably fit one in a large jacket pocket, which is more than you can say for the original Deck.
There is one slight drawback, though. PhyFawkes hasn’t yet been able to hook up the screen, which is a suitably sized 1200 x 1080 90 Hz OLED panel in traditional Game Boy config. It’s going to require an adapter board between the motherboard output and the display, plus a BIOS mod as well by the looks of things, so that’s the next task to be ticked off.
PhyFawkes also says that triggers are on the checklist. At least one of them, anyway, which is apparently in a good spot on the board in terms of being mounted somewhere usable on the outside.
So watch this space, as the Steam Boy is definitely a project to keep an eye on. Alongside all the Steam Machine mods we’ve been covering recently, like this water cooling project, or this RX 9070 XT eGPU setup. There’s something about Valve’s hardware that makes y’all want to tear it apart, huh?
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