This Modder Is Making a Retro Gaming Handheld That Plays Actual SNES Cartridges

We’re in a renaissance of retro tech thanks to modders willing to push the envelope of old-school gaming. Take this ongoing project to scale down an old Nintendo SNES mainboard so it can fit in a device you can hold comfortably in your hands. Even better, it will eventually be able to play the actual cartridges going all the way back to 1990.

This latest DIY design comes from tinkerer YveltalGriffin. You may have heard of them from their work on the Nintendo Kawaii, an open-source mod for the Nintendo Wii that breaks down Nintendo’s console from 2006 and shrinks it to fit on a keychain. In their new project, dubbed αSNES, the modder takes the 480 components found inside the original SNES and adds them to a custom bare board that’s much smaller in size compared to the 35-year-old original. The eventual plan is to hook it up to a custom display and controller switches to turn it into a handheld.

αSNES mainboard prototype— a complete 1Chip Super Nintendo, Super Everdrive, Shinobi Scaler (GBS Control), LCD driver, and more combined onto a single 125x96mm 6-layer PCB.

Real cartridges connect via the large FFC connector on the back. pic.twitter.com/XTQh68Qp7Y

— YveltalGriffin (@YveltalGriffin) July 21, 2025

While you can find plenty of similar handheld mods for retro consoles, few include the ability to play original cartridges. YveltalGriffin wrote that the SNES games would connect on the back of the device and would then link to the mainboard through an FFC ribbon cable. The console DIYer wrote on the BitBuilt forums saying that they still need to design the cartridge connection and daughterboard. There’s also still work needed to finish up the actual design of the case.

Fellow tinkerer Redherring32, who previously designed the pitch-perfect original Xbox handheld, is working on a portable version of a GameCube complete with the odd carrying handle. Similar to the αSNES, the portable GameCube is based on the original console’s mainboard, though trimmed down to fit within a smaller handheld. The modder wrote in a post on X that they are planning the device to have USB-C charging and video out for hooking it up to a TV. Otherwise, it includes a 480p display to play original GameCube games at their native resolution. Even better, it’s not much bigger than a Game Boy Advance. It can even play GBA games through a bottom slot.

I’m making a portable GameCube.
It’s not a Wii.

It’ll have a directly driven 480p laminated IPS panel for the crispiest GameCube pixels you’ve seen.

It’ll have USB C PD charging.
Video out over USB C.
Wireless 4 player multiplayer.

Oh, it’ll play Gameboy games too. pic.twitter.com/d6GyzTHzYE

— Redherring32 (@redherring32) July 18, 2025

These devices are not just emulation-based handhelds since they’re using the original hardware. Other handhelds like the Analogue Pocket or ModRetro Chromatic use FPGA, or field programmable gate array technology, to recreate the chip logic of the old-school hardware, meaning they can play the old Game Boy cartridges from yesteryear. As time goes on, I imagine we’ll see even more FPGA devices for older hardware, especially with recreation consoles like the Analogue 3D on the way. That device is supposed to let players play their old N64 cartridges on a modern TV and scale them up to 4K. You’ll just have to keep waiting for it, as Analogue recently delayed the 3D console until August, citing tariffs as the cause. Until then, we’ll salivate over the numerous DIY handhelds we can’t buy but desperately wish we could.