The Retro Song Bird may look similar to devices like Epilogue’s GB Operator with a slot on top for Game Boy cartridges, but it’s not designed for playing retro games. The featureless box is instead a media player designed to play through all the music and sound effect files on Game Boy cartridges using a basic set of play controls on board for skipping tracks and adjusting the volume of its built-in speaker. It’s like a reimagined Sony Walkman that trades cassette tapes for your childhood game carts you refused to get rid of.
Created by a talented builder simply known as BJ, the Retro Song Bird includes additional functionality. While the built-in speaker reproduces the tunes close to how they sounded through the original Game Boy, there’s also a stereo line out connection for connecting it to better speakers or for recording and sampling purposes. Each of the Game Boy’s four sound channels are available as separate USB audio streams, and the Retro Song Bird can be used to back up ROMs and save game data, or export music files as WAV files to a PC.
Only a few prototypes of the Retro Song Bird have been created so far and they’re not for sale, according to Retro Dodo, but BJ plans to potentially crowdfund or sell the music player directly once its hardware and design is finalized.