Resourceful gamer shrinks Valve’s Steam Deck into Game Boy, with custom 3D-printed cooling — plans display around 1200×1080, 90Hz AMOLED panel
A Steam Deck enthusiast and modder is close to finalizing the ‘SteamBoy.’ Of course, this WIP project shoehorns the brains and brawn of Valve’s Steam Deck into the form factor of the original Nintendo Game Boy. If it were the other way around, for some bizarre reason, it would be called the GameDeck. PhyFawkes’ project appears to be progressing splendidly, though the non-trivial hurdles of designing a custom display adapter PCB and fitting a new screen remain.
PhyFawkes’ SteamBoy project began after a handheld gaming lightbulb moment. “The Steam Deck motherboard seems pretty small,” the Redditor thought to themselves. “I wonder if you could make a Steam Deck the size of a Game Boy?”
As you can see from the embedded photos, a lot of the design already completed for this hybrid modern heart in a retro shell device seems spot on. We’d appreciate more beige, but that’s mere cosmetics and a simple 3D printer filament swap in the future, perhaps. PhyFawkes says that, as the project stands, “It has a fully functional LCD Steam Deck motherboard, battery, speakers, and all the face buttons you see here. No custom PCBs needed (so far), and all within the dimensions of a Game Boy.”
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Elsewhere in their Reddit post, we learn that a 30 x 7mm fan and heatsink from AliExpress have been used, alongside a custom 3D-printed mount, to cool the new SteamBoy. Using this cooler design and a smidgen of undervolting, reasonable max temperatures of between 70 and 80 degrees Celsius have been observed when gaming.
Getting the screen to interface and fit doesn’t sound like an insurmountable task from the description. The Redditor admits it will be a challenge to fit the “1200×1080, 90Hz AMOLED panel, originally intended for VR” into the shell, but they have a plan. A custom adapter PCB, to be situated between the Steam Deck ribbon cable and the display, is in the making. Then, a BIOS mod will need to be implemented. PhyFawkes says this firmware change will be similar to those seen in the DeckHD and Deck Sight projects.
For those of you thirsty for more SteamBoy info, the modder has also just shared a Reddit post packed with teardown images, and another post demonstrating the unit. This video demo shows the SteamBoy operating while attached to a monitor. That’s the only way to use the device until the aforementioned screen integration challenges are met. “Hopefully it won’t be too long before that’s working as well,” added PhyFawkes in a comment.
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