Latest news with #ModRetroChromatic
Yahoo
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
ModRetro Announces Return of the ModRetro Chromatic With New Exciting Extras
The ModRetro Chromatic captured the hearts of retro enthusiasts and those who grew up playing the Game Boy and Game Boy Colour. Still, after its initial launch in late 2024, the pixel-perfect handheld has become exceedingly difficult to find in the wild, that is, until now. ModRetro Chromatic has announced that their popular handheld device will enter mass production and become a permanent fixture in the new supply chain. Not only that, but to sweeten the pot, ModRetro promises a brand-new colourway for the ModRetro Chromatic to coincide with the release of some classic new games for the Game Boy successor on top of the already existing lineup of fun colours, with the latest variant joining the lineup labelled as Cloud, which features a white and purple treatment, somewhat reminiscent of the Super Nintendo. Additionally, the long-awaited rechargeable battery pack for the ModRetro Chromatic will be made available alongside a mod pack, which allows those who like to tinker to swap out parts, refreshing or customizing their handheld to their choosing. In addition, ModRetro will also release a branded Link cable and Koss Porta Pro headphones to complement the handheld, completing the retro arsenal of gaming goodness. A detailed breakdown of the accessories and new games coming to the ModRetro Chromatic can be viewed below: Sabrina: The Animated Series – Zapped! A re-release of the fast-paced platformer based on the cartoon series, where you switch between Sabrina and Salem to reverse a magical mishap. Wicked Plague: A side-scrolling Metroidvania with fast-paced action, haunting visuals, and intense boss fights in a cursed tower. Self-Simulated: A high-speed precision platformer with over 100 levels, customizable assists, and a story about reclaiming your lost identity. First Contact Protocol: An adventure-puzzle game with branching choices, cinematic cutscenes, and a crew fighting to survive aboard a damaged starship. Gravitorque: A puzzle platformer where you control gravity instead of jumping, solving mind-bending levels across four distinct worlds. ModRetro Rechargeable Power Core ($29.99): Snap-in battery for up to 16 hours of gameplay. ModRetro Link Cable ($14.99): Bring back couch co-op with head-to-head multiplayer support. ModRetro Mod Kit ($14.99): Personalizes or refreshes with high-quality, swappable parts and a one-of-a-kind dual-sided screwdriver. ModRetro Koss Porta Pro ($49.99): A colour-matched retro headset with legendary sound. On the software side of things, ModRetro promises new features via firmware updates for the ModRetro Chromatic, including native streaming via Discord on Mac and PC, with no additional dock required. Finally, official ModRetro cartridges will now be able to receive game updates or patches via what ModRetro is calling its Cart Clinic service, ensuring that all physical games are free of bugs or issues going forward. Lastly, ModRetro plans to team up with some major names in the gaming space, including Ubisoft, Atari, and Argonaut Games; however, details are scarce for now. Nevertheless, this collaboration is exciting for the future of the ModRetro Chromatic. For further details, readers are encouraged to visit the official ModRetro Chromatic website. For those who missed out on the initial wave of handhelds, which sold out almost immediately, portable gaming enthusiasts can rest easy in knowing that ModRetro will deliver more units, hopefully making the ModRetro Chromatic more readily available alongside its expanding library of new and classic releases that bring the Gameboy into the modern age while retaining that authentic look and feel of the original. And if you're new or unfamiliar with the system, the ModRetro Chromatic is fully compatible with both DMG Game Boy titles and Game Boy Color games, which further take advantage of the sapphire crystal 1:1 display of the handheld, making it one of the best ways to play your classic library of games.
WIRED
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- WIRED
The ModRetro Chromatic Is a Game Boy Fit for Your Apocalypse Bunker
Jul 10, 2025 12:00 PM Palmer Luckey's sold-out, souped-up cartridge-only console clone is back—and this time, it wants to live forever. It took just 24 hours for the ModRetro Chromatic to sell out when it launched December 2024. An unapologetic Game Boy clone packaged in a slick, tough new shell, it delivered the perfect dose of gaming nostalgia alongside a few modern upgrades. Keen to build on that success, ModRetro has revamped production efforts and rejiggered its supply chain to make sure the Chromatic can stand the test of time. Now, the snazzy, geeky gadget is available for sale again—this time with new features, new games and a brand new colorway. The company, helmed by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, says this time there will be no shortages of the Chromatic. It'll cost you $199 with no games, or $299 for a version with a beefier sapphire crystal screen. More than that, Luckey wants the device to last, basically forever. Maybe even become the Game Boy's final form. 'In theory, you could put this in a box for a hundred years and then pop in a pair of batteries and it would just go,' says Luckey. 'If you're saying this is going to be the last Game Boy ever made—that this is the thing that will persist and be the way you experience that whole era of gaming—you better make something to last. It's almost like you have a moral duty to make sure it's something that is going to survive.' Luckey, Silicon Valley's preeminent Hawaiian-shirt-clad tech bro, is famous—or infamous, depending on how you look at it—for pioneering VR tech and military defense alike. In 2012, he created the Oculus Rift, the product that effectively gave life to the then merely theoretical VR industry. He's had a controversial journey since then, selling Oculus to Facebook in 2014, then leaving in an acrimonious split three years later. He moved on to start the military industrial tech company Anduril (named after a sword from the Lord of the Rings series) that now makes attack drones, border surveillance tech, and AI-powered weapons. His right-wing political leanings, while once out of favor in Silicon Valley, are now on display much more freely by the broader tech elite. Luckey has recently been re-embraced by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (née Facebook), in his own rightward turn. Another of Luckey's recent endeavors, a crypto-bank called Erebor (after the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit ), is being funded by conservative billionaire and fellow LoTR nomenclature enthusiast Peter Thiel, the CEO of Palantir. On another front, Luckey is still very into the tech of the past. The name ModRetro comes from a forum Luckey created as a kid to interact with other gadget enthusiasts. The thing that stuck with him the most from his childhood was the Game Boy. The Chromatic isn't the only Game Boy replacement out there. Nintendo has a collection of classic Game Boy games available to download (for a price). You can find emulators online. There are devices like Analogue Pocket that aim to recreate the experience of a physical Game Boy and even offer more games to play. Luckey says that while those efforts are all good, they come with compromises that he wants to blow right past. 'If something is worth doing, it's worth someone in the industry doing it right,' Luckey says. If you can get past that baggage of a fun gadget being tied to an arms dealer, reviews of the first edition of the Chromatic make the device sound very good. As a handheld gaming device, the ModRetro Chromatic harkens back to nostalgia of the early '90s Game Boy era, albeit housed in a case that is built like a bomb shelter. With the heft of a graphing calculator, the Chromatic leans into the chonkiness of early gaming handhelds, albeit with some much more modern upgrades. The gadgetry within is housed in a lightweight magnesium alloy chassis, assembled in a clamshell format that is meant to be straightforward to take apart. The screens are protected with Gorilla Glass, or you can opt for the scratch-resistant sapphire crystal surface for an extra $100. The buttons are made of satisfyingly clicky metals. The screws, though still the less common tri-wing screws found in early Game Boys, are easy enough to take out and replace. According to Torin Herndon, the lead engineer at ModRetro who has worked with Luckey at Anduril and Oculus, repairability and the ability to fix or tweak the device were paramount. 'The idea is to preserve it for multiple generations down the line, so what we had to do was make the device as deserving of that as possible,' Herndon says. 'And then to architect the device in a way that is really going against the grain of planned obsolescence.' For that reason, the console exclusively plays cartridge games, just like its progenitor. There are no digital downloads, though game makers can issue bug fixes or updates if connected to the internet. Accessories for the Chromatic include rechargeable battery packs, cables, and a headset range in cost from $15-$50. You can also buy a dedicated modification kit which lets you take apart the device and alter it as you see fit. On the library front, the Chromatic has launched with 15 games you can buy, and a special version of Tetris created by ModRetro comes packaged with the device. ModRetro has teased future partnerships for games made with industry stalwarts like Ubisoft, Atari, and Argonaut Games. Otherwise, if you want to play a game, you'll have to find a second-hand Game Boy or Game Boy Color cartridge somewhere. The Chromatic is backwards compatible, so old Game Boy games should work, assuming you've blown on the cartridge enough to get the dust out, of course. Despite the retro-focus, the Chromatic has a few new tricks wired into it as well. A USB-C port can be used for charging or for piping live video directly from the Chromatic to streaming services via Mac, PC, and Discord. That means you can stream directly from the device, which Luckey says will likely delight speedrunners eager to break records on Game Boy games without having to use external cameras to record the feats. (The software that enables streaming capabilities is backwards compatible, meaning it will be work of first-edition Chromatics as well.) 'The goal of Chromatic in a non-technical sense is not to replicate the experience of actually playing a Game Boy or Game Boy Color, it's to replicate the way that you felt playing it when you were younger,' Luckey says. 'You want it to be authentic but also to live up to that rose-tinted recollection of how you remember it.' Aside from all that nostalgia, ModRetro is also trying to make a push to reinforce the concept of ownership. Though the timing isn't deliberate, Herndon points to recent efforts like Stop Killing Games, a movement of game advocates calling for the preservation of digital and online games so they can't just be taken down by the provider. 'That is one of the most upsetting things about being a modern gamer,' Herndon says. 'The true ownership experience back then is something has really gone by the wayside today, and we wanted to recapture that feeling.' Ultimately, Luckey hopes the Chromatic isn't the last stop in ModRetro's efforts. He has his eyes set on recreating the Game Boy Advance and other retro platforms like the Nintendo 64. Eventually, he hopes the process, drawn out though it can be, will help preserve other aging technologies. 'This all sounds a lot more ridiculous and self masturbatory when you're just making a Game Boy thing,' Luckey says. 'But I'm hoping that at some point people will see ModRetro as a portal into the past that is going to live on forever. And then what I'm saying maybe won't seem quite as crazy.'
Android Authority
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Android Authority
The Game Boy of my dreams is finally back in stock for good
ModRetro Chromatic The ModRetro Chromatic is the ultimate Game Boy, with an enhanced but authentic screen and exquisite build quality. If you can stomach the price tag, it's the best way to play original GB and GBC carts. The Game Boy was my very first gaming device, and it has always held a special place in my heart. My parents actually bought two classic DMG Game Boys (one for me and one for my older sister), but they both ended up in my collection once she developed a social life and I retreated deeper into my digital shell. I'd continue the trend of picking up two of every Game Boy before moving on to the Nintendo DS. But since then, I've moved halfway across the world, and my Game Boy collection sits idly at my childhood home. Thankfully, emulation makes it easy to relive that era of my youth, but emulation can only get so close. So when the ModRetro Chromatic landed on my desk after being sold out for the better part of a year, I couldn't wait to dive in. After a few weeks with the device, there's no doubt in my mind that this is the ultimate Game Boy experience. I don't think I'll ever be able to afford two for my collection, but it's the first time in years I've felt the exact same spark of joy that started my gaming journey back in the early 90s. And even better, it will be permanently back in stock starting today with a few extra goodies. Editor's note: ModRetro was created by Palmer Luckey, a controversial billionaire with ties to weaponized drones and other military tech. ModRetro and the Chromatic aren't otherwise tied to those industries, but it does cast a shadow over an otherwise innocuous device. The ultimate Game Boy Nick Fernandez / Android Authority The most important thing to understand about the Chromatic is that it only plays Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges. In other words, it's an FPGA device that replicates the original hardware as closely as possible. It's actually more cycle accurate than its competitors, most notably the Analogue Pocket, although you probably won't notice the difference. That made this review slightly complicated, since all of my original carts are thousands of miles away at my mother's house. Thankfully, the device comes with an updated version of Tetris in the box, and I was able to borrow a few carts from some nerdy neighbors. Nick Fernandez / Android Authority Of course, ModRetro itself also makes and sells cartridges with re-released and brand-new titles. They're fairly expensive, but opening the box and reading through the manuals really took me back to a simpler time. That feeling was present the entire time I was testing the Chromatic in a way I didn't entirely expect. I've gotten so used to playing games on emulators that I had forgotten the thrill of playing without save states and rewinds to fall back on. At first, it was a little frustrating and, frankly, humbling for a 30-something-year-old me. But the act of popping in a cartridge, flipping the switch, and hopping directly into a game is so smooth, so seamless, that I was immediately taken back to my first years of handheld gaming. The Chromatic took me right back to my first years of handheld gaming. Nostalgia-tinted glasses or not, it's easy to see that the Chromatic is much, much better than the original hardware. Just taking it out of the box, the build quality is excessively premium, with a magnesium frame that feels built to survive the apocalypse. In fact, ModRetro shows the Chromatic getting run over by a car in its marketing materials, although I wouldn't dare test that myself. I introduced my six-year-old daughter to Tetris on this machine, and when it slipped out of her hands it made a terrifyingly loud noise when it hit the floor. In the end, it was just batteries popping out of the back, but I'm not sure the cheap emulation handhelds I usually play with would have survived unscathed. Yes, this thing runs on three AA batteries, three of which are included in the box. There's a battery indicator in the firmware that goes well beyond a red light to indicate a pending replacement, plus a new rechargeable battery pack, which I'll get to in a moment. Nick Fernandez / Android Authority The other major upgrade from the original hardware is the custom screen, which is the best possible mix of new and old. It's a backlit LCD panel with enough brightness to play outside in the full summer sun, but it maintains the same resolution, pixel density, and color profile as the Game Boy Color. No fancy upscaling or shaders, just a pure retro experience. The D-pad and buttons are also great, although I did notice that the face buttons are fairly loud. The start/select buttons also lose the rubbery finish of the originals, which is probably for the best. The mono speaker on the bottom of the device gets shockingly loud with the volume wheel maxed, but it still sounds great. There's also a headphone jack on the bottom with stereo sound for the games that support it. Nick Fernandez / Android Authority There's one extra button the side, and it opens the console's settings. The menu lets you change the screen brightness, turn on or off diagonals, check firmware, and more. It's just enough to enhance the Game Boy experience without overpowering it. Everything from the screen to the build is excessively premium. When all is said and done, it's clear that the Chromatic is the ultimate way to play Game Boy cartridges. It doesn't have any modern emulation niceties like save states or fast forward, but with the training wheels removed you really get to play these games the way they were meant to be played. What's old is new Nick Fernandez / Android Authority The bad news is that the Chromatic has been sold out for more than six months, with only the worst colorway available from GameStop. Today, that changes. ModRetro has now fully restocked every color of the Chromatic, and taken steps to ensure it stays in stock for the foreseeable future. All six of the original colorways — Inferno, Leaf, Bubblegum, V0lt, Wave, and Midnight — are back, with one more Cloud colorway added to the mix. There are also new accessories going on sale today: ModRetro Rechargeable Power Core ($29.99): A battery pack providing up to 16 hours of gameplay. ($29.99): A battery pack providing up to 16 hours of gameplay. ModRetro Link Cable ($14.99): A backwards-compatible link cable for multiplayer. ($14.99): A backwards-compatible link cable for multiplayer. ModRetro Mod Kit ($14.99): A kit with swappable parts and a one of a kind dual sided screwdriver. ($14.99): A kit with swappable parts and a one of a kind dual sided screwdriver. ModRetro Koss Porta Pro ($49.99): A color-matched retro headset. For my money, the Rechargeable Power Core is the most interesting, since it can charge while you play. Standard rechargeable AA batteries work just fine, but there's no passthrough charging. You'll need to remove them to recharge, although you don't have to turn the device off as long as you keep it plugged in. The Chromatic is now permanently back in stock, with new accessories and games. There are also a few new games available, as well as a new feature called Cart Clinic that lets you update your Chromatic cartridges to add new features. Note that this isn't the firmware on the device itself, but the actual cartridge. Saves might not be compabile between versions, but it's a really cool way to add new gameplay features or fixes to physical carts. ModRetro Chromatic review: Should you buy it? Nick Fernandez / Android Authority While I absolutely love the ModRetro Chromatic, its price makes it hard to recommend for anyone but diehard Game Boy fans. As part of the permanent restock, the price has also been adjusted. The premium version with a Sapphire Glass screen has now been bumped up to $299, with a new Gorilla Glass version at the initial $199 price point. That's a lot of money, especially when you can get a Game Boy-like emulation handheld like the Retroid Pocket Classic ($129.99 at Manufacturer site) for significantly less. That device doesn't feel as premium, but it can emulate not just Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, and everything up to and including some PS2. For even less, you can pick up a Linux-based handheld like the TrimUI Brick ($84.99 at Amazon). But there's something truly special about playing games the way they were supposed to be played. It's a frictionless experience that's hard to emulate (no pun intended). It also plays your original carts without the need to dump them, which is a huge advantage for anyone with a sizeable collection. If you don't have any carts, you're obviously not going to get much out of the Chromatic without shelling out even more cash to build out your physical library. The Chromatic offers the ultimate Game Boy experience. When looking at other FPGA devices, the Analogue Pocket ($219.99 at Manufacturer site) is the obvious alternative. It looks more modern, but it's less cycle accurate, and the 3.5-inch 1600 x 1440 display is less faithful to the original look of the games. The upside is that it can also play Game Boy Advance cartridges out of the box, as well as Neo Geo Pocket Color, Game Gear, and others, if you buy the optional adapters. Another option is an FPGBC kit, which allows you to build a completely custom device that's the spitting image of the original Game Boy Color. All of the parts will run you about half the price of the Chromatic, but you'll have to put it together yourself and it won't feel nearly as premium. But if you want the ultimate Game Boy experience, it doesn't get any better than the ModRetro Chromatic. Dedicated collectors can easily justify the expense (or any expense, to be honest), and although I wish it were made by a company owned by a less controversial figure, I'm absolutely delighted that this device exists at all. ModRetro Chromatic Authentic experience • Exquisite build quality • Bright, beautiful screen MSRP: $199.99 The ultimate Game Boy. The ModRetro Chromatic modernizes the Game Boy experience in all the right ways. See price at Manufacturer site Positives Authentic experience Authentic experience Exquisite build quality Exquisite build quality Bright, beautiful screen Cons Expensive Expensive Less versatile than emulation Less versatile than emulation Controversial origins
