Wide compatibility with any Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance cartridges. Supports accessories like Game Boy Camera. Save data backup and transfer tool. Exhaustive list of filters, tweaks, cheats, and emulation tools to experiment with. Bargain price.

Not as portable or convenient as an actual Game Boy. Doesn’t remember some preferences universally. No save states (yet).

The Game Boy family of handheld consoles was groundbreaking, making gaming more accessible to millions worldwide. Nintendo’s portables beat off technologically superior competition from the likes of Sega’s Game Gear and Atari’s Lynx. They became home to foundational moments for the medium, from what is still arguably the definitive version of Tetris to the birth of Pokémon. Yet with the iconic gray monolith launching in 1989, it’s now pushing 40—and playing those important classics gets tougher every year.

If you have a collection of original, physical Game Boy cartridges in 2026, you essentially have two options. One is to hope your original console still works—a Game Boy Advance is best here, being a comparatively fresh-faced 25 years old with backward compatibility for original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges. The other is to pick up a third-party field-programmable gate array (FPGA) console, like the Analogue Pocket, which also offers broad compatibility with all original carts. However, the former is victim to the ravages of time, with fewer functioning units available as the years march on, while the latter is a pricier investment tailored to hardcore collectors.

Enter option three: Epilogue’s GB Operator, a way to play original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges, directly on your computer, for a penny less than $50.

Emulation Nation

The GB Operator is billed as “a cartridge slot for your computer,” and rarely has a tech product been so accurately described. Unpack it, and you’ll find an unassuming translucent cuboid, a circuit board in a perspex box, the slot itself the only indication that something interesting is going on here. It measures a positively pocketable 1.3 × 1.2 × 3.5 inches and weighs a negligible 1.5 ounces. Setup is a breeze: Just plug it into your computer with the included USB-C cable, which also provides power, install the Playback software (available for PC, Mac, and Linux), and … that’s it.

Slot a cart in and Playback should automatically detect it, recognize the game and region it’s from, and pull up its cover art and a description. The software does an authenticity check when you insert a cartridge, which Epilogue says is 97.8 percent accurate. Anyone around for the original Game Boy will remember the plague of knockoff carts, so for collectors, it’s nice to have that peace of mind. This really is a gadget focused on celebrating the legitimate physical media from back in the day.

Games run through emulation. Epilogue Playback defaults to the popular mGBA emulator, though you can select from several other cores—the engine that mimics the original console’s hardware—or you can use your own if you prefer. It’s a great touch for anyone deeply immersed in that side of the retro gaming scene. Whichever core you choose, Playback allows users to get into the nuts and bolts of game settings, fine-tuning performance down to precise details such as frame skips and audio offsets. For anyone dipping their toes into emulation, everything is explained in refreshingly clear, jargon-free language, too.

Game Boy Imax

If you just want to play your old games, you don’t need to deal with any of that—just hit ‘Start’ and travel back in time for some vintage gaming bliss.

The visuals are the most striking difference when playing through the GB Operator. Whether in windowed or full-screen view, you’re getting a massive step up from the 160 × 144-pixel resolution of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color screens, and even the Advance’s luxurious 240 × 160-pixel resolution pales compared to modern monitors. Here, you see every last pixel programmed into the originals, blown up to colossal size. Seeing what were once tiny games at such a scale can take some getting used to, but it’s a delight to appreciate all the detail and artistry packed in.

While Game Boy Advance games run essentially as-is, showcasing the richness of that full color 32-bit era, the emulator provides a treasure trove of visual filters to play around with for original Game Boy games. By default, Game Boy cartridges load in a more modern grayscale, but there are options to play them in the classic green-and-black look, replicate the monochrome screens of the Game Boy Pocket, or mimic the brightness of the Japan-only Game Boy Light. The various color highlights that the Game Boy Color would apply to original Game Boy games are there too, as are the filters from the Super Game Boy (the adapter that ran Game Boy carts on the Super Nintendo). Optionally, you can display the frame rate too—I got a reliable 60 frames per second on every cart I tested.

Running the carts through an emulator allows for some modern tweaks. Epilogue integrates support for Retro Achievements (note that a separate account login is required), allowing you to track accomplishments in these older games, and Playback can automatically pull up a list of cheats for each cart. Go ahead: 30-odd years on, infinite lives aren’t hurting anyone.

Playback also allows performance and settings to be tailored on a per-game basis, including completely remapping controls or accelerating game speed. The only downside is that it seems to lack some helpful universal settings. For instance, I couldn’t find a way to set my Xbox controller as the default input—Playback randomly switched back to keyboard controls after I changed carts.

Physical Ephemera

When Epilogue says the GB Operator is universally compatible, it means that. I’ve thrown over a dozen carts at the device, testing out US, European, and Australian releases from all three main Game Boy console generations, and it’s recognized and played every single one.

Some took a little longer to launch, as Playback loads it into its emulator. Sonic Advance 3 took the longest, roughly a minute—ironic, given its speedy protagonist—but I was able to load and play every title I tried. Any save data still on the carts was read smoothly too, allowing me to jump right back into an endgame boss battle in Treasure’s brilliant-but-tough Astro Boy: Omega Factor. Sadly, my memory of the controls years after I last played wasn’t nearly as well preserved.

The Operator even handles some of the curiosities that graced the various Game Boys over the decades. Case in point: my copy of Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django, an experimental title from Death Stranding auteur Hideo Kojima that used a solar sensor baked into the game cartridge to power up the protagonist’s weapons. Released for the GBA in 2005, it dared gamers to do the unthinkable: leave the house and get some sun. In 2026, you can plug it into the GB Operator and tell the Playback software to act as though it’s a bright day. Sure, it defeats the point, but it’s cool that even these niche titles are catered to. Epilogue says it even supports accessories like the Game Boy Camera, allowing you to use it as a webcam, although I don’t have one to test.

The only downside to relying on the original cartridges is the carts themselves. If they’re not well-maintained, they can be prone to read errors. I picked up a second-hand Game Boy Color copy of Disney’s Tarzan—it loaded but kept cutting out, which I suspect was down to the cartridge’s physical contacts eroding over time, meaning the GB Operator couldn’t reliably read the data. A few others also weren’t immediately recognized in the Playback software, but the time-honored ritual of blowing into them sorted the issue.

Preservation Society

While the GB Operator comfortably allows you to play your existing physical library through your computer, it’s also useful for preservation and new game creation purposes. The Playback software lets you back up a game’s save data to your computer, which has some real utility. Carts that stored progress locally (as opposed to older password systems) typically relied on a battery to do so, and once that runs out, so do your save files.

I found this out first-hand when loading up my copy of Pokémon Gold—whether I’d caught ‘em all back in 2001, I’ll never be able to confirm, as the battery died at some point in the last quarter-century(!). Booting it up through the GB Operator was like switching it on for the first time. However, if it had still contained my surely-completed Pokédex, I’d have been able to copy that data to my laptop’s hard drive, replace the battery in the cartridge (a fiddly process, but doable), and then load the save back onto it—magic.

However, it’s worth noting that at present, everything relies on the cartridge’s actual save processes. While virtual “snapshot” saves—capturing a game at any given moment—are on Epilogue’s roadmap, the feature is not yet available. It will first be tested through the experimental “Nightly Builds” version of Playback (found at the bottom of the downloads page) before being fully implemented.

You can also use the GB Operator to dump the entire main game data from a cart you personally own, allowing you to make a legal copy for your own archival purposes (don’t share; that’s when it becomes piracy). The process itself is quick, depending on the game’s size, but even the Game Boy Advance’s biggest games were 32 MB at most. Even if you do back up a game in this manner, GB Operator still requires the original cart to run anything, though—you can’t just load the dumped ROM through the Playback software.

Finally, if you’re an aspiring developer or into retro-style indie games, it allows you to transfer homebrew games created through the likes of GB Studio onto a flash cart and play them on an actual Game Boy. It’s another niche feature, but one that’s great to have, allowing present-day creators to build on the legacy of the beloved handhelds.

It’s honestly hard to find much fault with the GB Operator. Even highlighting that it lacks real portability—sure, it’s tiny, but needing to be hooked up to a computer robs it of the pick-up-and-play appeal of the pocket-sized consoles it homages—feels like splitting hairs. It ultimately does everything it promises, all for less than $50.

This is a marvelous bit of kit, and the overall performance and utility bode extremely well for Epilogue’s upcoming SN Operator, which aims to do the same for the Super Nintendo as this does for the Game Boy family (and a mysterious “?? Operator” to follow). If you’re looking for an easy, low-budget way to revisit or revive your Game Boy collection, this is your best option.