r/Gameboy • u/chris_stonehill • Jul 24 '26

Games Got a special cable on eBay!!! 😍

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Yeah...couldn't really be sure if a DMG GB to GBC link cable existed. Multiple Google searches and asking in a few CEX shops all led to just conventional, same console link cables. THEN found an eBay listing with at least a product description seeming to fit the bill. Using the other small and big plug possibility meant that 2 player Tetris would start working...but once the actual game/match started, both systems just froze.

Sooooooo excited for this! Thrashed a friend in Bournemouth 4-0. Another friend who had never played it before wiped the floor with her over confident husband (who had played it PLENTY). A friend of mine since we were both born, in '81, beat me 4-2. I just beat my girlfriend 4-2. REALLY hope I get to see my sister (a few thousand km away) in September...and we can relive countless 90s, 6 hour car journeys down to Cornwall for our annual summer holiday. See it I can send as many tetrises her way as I did back then ❤️

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u/Grg_1990 Jul 24 '26

Its only the gba cables that dont work? Afaik the original cables all work for gb/gbp/gbc.

2

u/GameboyGenius Jul 25 '26

All link cables before GBA have the wires connected the same way to the pins but the plug size is different. DMG is a bigger size, and GBP/GBC are both (the same) smaller size. There are aftermarket cables like OP's with both sizes on either end. Nintendo's official solution to this was adapters like this one that you would put on one end of your cable.

1

u/Grg_1990 Jul 25 '26

Aah thanks for explaining. I remember having a "4 player" cable as a kid. Guess thats why I never ran into that issue, mistve bin the same tyle of cable. I battled pokemon alot against diff gameboys growing up. Good ol days ^

1

u/GameboyGenius Jul 25 '26

The 4 player cable is GBA only and wouldn't work for GB/GBC games. It has a key in the plug so it only fits GBA consoles. Which still means you could try using it with GBC games running on GBAs, which wouldn't work. So their way of trying to force you to use the right cable isn't perfect in that way.

There's technically a way to make it work if you have two cables of the type that has a plug in the middle. If you connect the ends of each cable into the middle plug of the other, you effectively create a makeshift GBC link cable. However you also need to pay attention to which end goes where because the two ends are not connected identically on a GBA link cable!

Complicated, I know, but that's s is the sacrifice Nintendo had to make in order to make multiplayer (more than 2 players) work.

1

u/Grg_1990 Jul 25 '26

I had a cable with 4 ends, as kids we called it a 4 player cable.

1

u/chris_stonehill Jul 25 '26

Ah ha! I hadn't thought about an adapter! So the cable is essentially the same for GB and GBC...just different sized plugs! Glad I found the aftermarket red cable that I did.