This hacked Game Boy is a better Apple TV remote than the real thing

It's not for us to get into whether or not the Apple TV Remote is an ingenious piece of hardware or — actually, now that we think about that, it is exactly for us to get into, but that's neither here nor there anymore. Why? Just look at this Game Boy modded-out to control an Apple TV.

Designed by Otto Climan, the custom remote uses a standard Game Boy Color as its base, accompanied by a backlit LCD screen upgrade and a badass custom casing from Retro Modding that features Apple's early, iconic rainbow-hued logo. Oh, and it's at no cost to the Game Boy's ability to still play games. Check out the video below for the how-to (alas, in Italian, but it's still badass, nonetheless).

Technically speaking, not all that difficult — Don't speak Italian? Neither do we, but non preoccuparti, we've got you covered. To pull off this wondrous feat, Climan designed a Game Boy cartridge both with the ability to run ROM files and a built-in microSD card slot. Vintage Game Boy Colors use infrared ports to communicate data between a handheld and whatever cartridge is inserted into it, and while newer Apple TVs and their remotes employ Bluetooth, they still maintain the older models' capability for IR.

Knowing this, Climan dug up the required Apple software code online and coded his own ROM file to utilize a GBC's IR port. The result is a clunky, awesome piece of retconned retrowave tech that, in all honesty, we'd take over an actual Apple TV Remote any day.

An inspiring piece of pop culture hardware — Game Boys are still going strong as one of the most popular pieces of nostalgia tech these days, evidenced not just from Climan's TV remote conversion, but the myriad other projects out there online. Take, for instance, this fully functional Game Boy clone that's the size of your thumbnail or this GBC that manages to also play Wii and GameCube games.

For those looking for newer iterations that don't rely on increasingly hard-to-find parts and repairs, there are much-coveted standalones like the Analogue Pocket, which will reportedly be able to play "Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Sega's Game Gear, Atari's Lynx, and the Neo Geo Pocket" titles perfectly when it finally is released. Unfortunately, the Analogue Pocket is about as rare as a Game Boy Apple remote these days, since even its pre-orders are currently out of stock. But hey, the Game Boy legacy remains strong, so we're sure these will be far from the last re-workings we see in the years ahead.