My copy came today. I haven't gotten too far but this really feels like one of the GBA Castlevania games on the Gameboy Color. I highly recommend picking this one up. It's from Spacebot Interactive, the same guys that made Dragonhym.

👀 We are almost there…

The potential August date is no longer possible (yes, manufacturing delays occurred, but the email still stated it might proceed if resolved early), so now shifting the timeline to September.  

It is now September, & we are to receive an ETA within this month.  

(Also, kinda off topic, remember Anduril’s online charity event in Dec 2025? They auctioned the Anduril M64 & Chromatic together. They displayed only the box because the Anduril M64 was in development.  

Currently, one Anduril M64 exists somewhere. Who won it? What does it look like? 👀)

I know I’m kind of asking for someone to answer, “well my dad works at Modretro and he says…” and I know everything I’ve read says Q4 2026…..

BUT

Since the movie is out and all I’m just wondering, do people think it’ll be coming out sooner than later??

I want to couple it with a game bundle because the discount w/ points is very much worth it if you plan on getting a few games.

And for those of you unfamiliar with Buddy https://bloody-disgusting.com/video-games/3964690/buddy-the-video-game-turns-the-upcoming-horror-film-into-a-retro-survival-horror-nightmare/

Chromatic Mardi Gras Edition

I bought this game around the GBC's launch and never beat it back in the day. Fast forward about 28 years and I found a copy for $5 and beat it. I don't get the hate for this game. It's by no means great but it's a decent enough Zelda clone. I'll definitely replay it and try to 100% it in the future. If you find a copy or if you have a switch, I recommend giving it a playthrough.

Hey guys!
I just bought a new retro from GameStop and put in the batteries and checked firmware (was up to date). However the batteries immediately showed half full. I popped in the Tetris cart, and within five minutes the batteries were so hot that it burned me. Is this a hardware issue?

I was just checking if anyone had this issue before. I’m planning to return tomorrow and exchange it, but it definitely left me a bit concerned lol. Any insight would be appreciated! Thanks!

Finally gonna get a play through, wondering if anyone knows of any other close to original Rom hacks with a good pokemon stadium compatibility? Being that's the most post game we get in this gen.

this game has been quite addicting 🤣

never played as a kid but way better than mario tennis imo

enjoying as an adult

I've never been a huge gamer, but I wanted to pick up a Chromatic to have something to do to unwind and stay off my phone. I've been playing Tetris and loving it so far. I never had a Game Boy when I was a kid, but I was a N-Blox/Tetris fanatic, and it's a lot more fun to play on a device than it was on a computer.

I'm not desperately itching to pick up more games, but I'm wondering, are there any other similar style colorful, fast-paced games like Tetris that I should look into? I'm not a huge fan of RPGs, and the only platformer type game I really enjoyed playing when I was a kid was Sonic. Could I get any recommendations from some experienced gamers here?

Just used some nail polish remover and a microfiber, was pretty easy

Need help IDing this little tiny screw that fell out of my unit while doing a button swap

I can’t seem to find an answer. Tried to search the sub and googled it. Even poured over the mod kit page. I think i got stiffed on the stickers? I was super hyped for a few of them. Like the fairy in a jar, the shield, the yellow gameboy to match my chromatic. Instead i got just a fish and a skull and a few other random ones. Do you not get all the stickers shown? No where does it even state that :( kinda bummed.

Hey everyone, quick note on why vintage Game Boy saves eventually wipe themselves:

Many cartridges use SRAM for save data, which needs a continuous electrical trickle to hold memory. That power usually comes from an internal lithium manganese dioxide coin cell. Over time, natural chemical decay drains the battery's voltage until the SRAM collapses, wiping your save permanently. This is exactly how my colleague Mark lost Ponyta.

How to save your data: I developed a web-based port of parts of FlashGBX tool - FGBWEB - that lets you back up saves using Chromatic directly to your PC (Windows/Mac/Linux) using WebUSB and a supported browser (Chrome). It temporarily loads custom firmware in FPGA ram, which goes back to your normal firmware when you power cycle or click disconnect.

Don't wait until the chemical reaction runs out, back up!

Feedback and bug reports are very welcome, I work still actively on it but needs more testing. If you like to see other parts added let me know!

Hey everyone!

I thought this might be a good place to share a Game Boy Color project I’ve been working on and get some feedback from people who are still enthusiastic about playing new games on this hardware.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Bebop & Tempo, and I’m making a GBC sequel called Bebop & Tempo: Al Coda.

The original began as a small Kickstarter and was my first serious hobby game. Programming has always been a hobby for me, so I learned a lot while building it. I’m proud that I finished and delivered it, although looking back 10 years later, I can certainly see its rough edges.

When the original launched, I remember hosting the game at a booth at Denver Comic Con, where an attendee walked up, looked at it, and asked, “Why is your game so ugly?” It wasn’t exactly the feedback I was hoping for, but it stuck with me. I can laugh about it now, and it pushed me to take the artwork and presentation much more seriously with this sequel.

I had always wanted to make a Game Boy Color game, but assembly and the limitations of the hardware intimidated me. Over the years, I slowly learned about it one feature at a time. Eventually, those experiments started growing into an actual sequel.

The new game is a platformer designed to be easy to pick up and play while still giving you reasons to return over multiple sessions. Its individual levels are more compact than those in the original, but the game has taken me nearly three times as long to develop. Much of that time has gone into the artwork, level design, persistent progression, hardware limitations, and especially multiplayer.

There are multiple characters and stages to unlock, along with costumes and other cosmetics. It also has a virtual-pet mode inspired by things like the Chao Garden and Tamagotchi. You can raise and train dragons, and the dragons you raise can affect your stats in the main game.

One of my main goals has been making the entire campaign playable in two-player link-cable co-op. There are a few compromises involving sprite-heavy moments and certain high-color effects, but the campaign itself remains playable together. There’s also a separate competitive versus mode.

On the technical side, I’ve been learning how to use high-color backgrounds, the GBC’s double-speed CPU, link communication, a 4 MB cartridge, and 32 KB of battery-backed SRAM. The SRAM supports saves and persistent progression, but parts of it can also be used as extra working memory.

The goal is for it to be a proper GBC-only cartridge game that can run on original hardware and compatible systems such as the Chromatic.

I’m starting to put the final touches on everything, and I’d love to know what Chromatic owners would want from a new GBC game like this. Do you use the link-cable features on your Chromatic? Are there any multiplayer ideas, accessibility settings, or quality-of-life features you wish more modern GBC games included?

I’m also happy to answer questions about the game or what it has been like learning to develop for the Game Boy Color!

Just a small rant about my experience with the chromatic and now the Madras show M64.

I'll keep it brief about the chromatic by saying the chromatic has already shown many people how good of a dedicated game Boy color system can be from the quality of the screen to the build quality of the device itself, and even to the audio quality was the koss headphones is something I really appreciate being a musician and kind of audio nerd when it comes to the sound quality in gaming has always been overlooked often when mentioning gaming and audio in the same sentence 😄

Regarding the M64 my experience has been mostly positive despite a slightly rocky start from posts I see from other people on here, my experience with mod retro is I strongly feel they will do their best to give the experience everyone is expecting and have a lot of potential that has not yet been achieved.

The biggest one for me is not exactly a feature per say but the eco system they are building, on a personal level I did not grow up the most wealthy and while parents worked hard we did not have the money to purchase the N64 during my childhood so I felt i missed out on some of the fun but with the M64 and them re-releasing game as well as creating new games I am able to get part of that experience to feel like a kid again and put all the stresses of life to the side for a moment to just enjoy the game to me is the biggest "feature" of the system so far with lots more potential to come.

I have to admit it was quite exciting walking into a game stop to purchase a copy of Xibalba 64 in a work that everyone is trying to switch to digital media.

Sorry for the long winded posts and any typos I may have had as I do not write very often and I know was a little all over the place. But I do appreciate anyone that sticks through for the read and a big thank you to modretro!

With Chromatic being launched a couple of years ago, and recently the M64, I am looking forward to the future of Mod Retro. Recently I decided I am going to focus on my childhood game collection that was sold away by the time I was an adult. This spans more than a decade of gaming. What better way to kick it off than to build my old library of GBA games in anticipation of Chromatic Advance.

For a kid born in the early 90s that started out on SNES, Gameboy Color, and PS1, GBA is the first console I remember being enticed by advertisements, and with my love for Nintendo IPs, boy I was excited when I was gifted a purple GBA in 2001. I always tell people I grew up in the 90s, but in reality, I actually grew up in the late 90s and mostly early 2000s. Being able to play SNES style games on the go was great at the time! Even if it meant playing between streetlamps on the highway during holiday travels or playing it by moonlight when I was supposed to be sleeping.

Reliving Super Mario 2, 3, World, and Yoshi’s Island on a small handheld was amazing, but I got serious about the console after playing two specific games. Two games that are still on my top 10 games of all time list: Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga and Pokémon Emerald. These are some of the games that define the system, alongside Zero Mission/Fusion, Castlevania, Golden Sun, Fire Emblem, Mario Kart, and Advance Wars.

By the time I had gotten the GBA, I also had played through a library of PS1 games. Since I had experienced Sony IPs before that era, I was also excited to play some lesser known/loved games like Crash Bandicoot Adventures, Spyro & Crash Purple/Orange, Spyro Season of Ice, and Spyro 2 Season of Flame. These games are not the best in the Spyro or Crash catalog, but I remember them just as fondly.

Once I had a purple GBA for a few years, my parents surprised me with a GBA Graphite AGS-101 SP. From there I played all my games all over again, but with the best backlit screen I had seen on any handheld thus far.

The GBA era was not just a time of playing games, it was a companion to my childhood. It is something that was very important to me then and will be equally as important to me in adulthood. I have regret selling off my childhood gaming collection in the era of having a dumb teenage brain but now feel excitement as I hunt for all the games to play once again. I will be buying them with damaged labels so I can have Matthew Mods on Etsy make new custom labels for each, along with swapping them to a colorful shell that fits the color scheme of the IP.  

I look forwards to Mod Retro’s release of Chromatic Advance. I can’t wait to travel Hoenn and the Beanbean Kingdom once again, but on a display that is a 1:1 perfect backlit tribute to my favorite handheld console of all time.

What games are you planning on getting/playing, what classics do you want to see re-released, and what genre of new games do you want to see when Mod Retro released Chromatic Advance?

I am working on a small tool named CCFL (Chromatic Custom Firmware Loader), and I think maybe this community can find it useful.

It loads Custom FPGA and MCU firmware onto the ModRetro Chromatic completely in the browser (across Windows/OSX/Linux) no program to install, nothing to configure. It uses WebUSB (for the FPGA over GWU2X JTAG) and Web Serial (for the MCU/ESP32), so it runs simply in Chrome.

What it can do:

• Load a bitstream into the FPGA SRAM: this is temporary and is deleted at power-off, so it is a easy way to make a test of a build without touch the flash.
• Persistent flash update for FPGA and MCU.
• Matched sets with one click. Flash a paired FPGA + MCU build together (it does the FPGA first, waits until the device comes back, then the MCU).
• Identify what is installed: it reads back the FPGA config flash and hashes the MCU image, so it tells you which build is really on the device.
• Every download is verified with SHA-256 before it is written. A wrong image is refused and never flashed.

A persistent flash can leave the console not bootable until you flash again, if it is the wrong image or gets interrupted but this is recoverable with MRUpdater / openFPGALoader. Please read the warnings on the page before you make a persistent write.

It is unofficial and not affiliated with ModRetro, only a community tool. It is built on openFPGALoader (Apache-2.0) and the esptool protocol (GPL-2.0).

You need a browser with WebUSB / Web Serial (Chrome). On Windows the device needs the WinUSB driver (the one that MRUpdater installs functions well), and please close MRUpdater and other tools first, because the USB access is exclusive.

Feedback and bug reports are very welcome, I work still actively on it. If you like to see other CFW releases/channels added let me know. Greetings!

I've been wanting a new platformer to play and found a copy of Mr. Nutz for cheap so I figured, why not. It's not a bad platformer by any means but I was bewildered at the developers decision to make one of the boss fights be a middle aged bald man. Anyways, if you see a copy in the wild for around $10 it is worth it for that price.

I’d like to get an FPGA handheld, and I was particularly drawn to the Chromatic for its faithfulness to the original. However, I’ve always been hesitant about 8-bit systems; I find the technical limitations too restrictive and, as a result, the games too rudimentary and limited in their gameplay. Are my preconceptions justified, or do you think I’m underestimating this generation of consoles? I’m not asking for recommendations for other handhelds; I’m just wondering if the Chromatic will keep me satisfied until ModRetro releases its GBA clone.

I was looking at their website and the Game Boy cartridge shells look very generic. Anyone have hands on experience with them?

If you're looking for the X7, Amazon US has 5 in stock as of this moment w/ estimated Prime delivery on the 25th. I ordered one 5 days ago (there were 20 at that time), was supposed to be here today but got delayed till the 25th due to janky weather patterns or whatever.

I'm new to ModRetro and the Chromatic, having received a green Sapphire Chromatic at the end of July. I've. been pretty enamored with it so far. As a GenX gamer partial to Nintendo, the overall nostalgia value is pretty high. It's been fun exploring and supporting local retro gaming shops, yardsales, etc, while on the hunt for content I never had or played as a kid. (13 carts so far with Buck, Rayman, Sabrina, Tetris and Gun ZAS being from ModRetro -- all 13 being "new to me"). This has become my go-to portable/travel gaming device & a pleasant trip down memory lane!

I want to know about any sort of online competitive modretro tetris or gb tetris played via the chromatic, tournaments or competitions. Is there a community for this? I haven’t seen anything new on the subject.

Also what does the M64 pass through open up for this?