The starting idea is a lovely one: take a console many of us grew up with and turn it into an instrument for real-time visuals and chiptune music. The maker ended up with Glitch Boy, a box that runs actual games while letting you corrupt them live, aimed at creatives who want to play pictures and sound at the same time.
The way it was put together is what grabs me. Rather than writing a clean emulator, the maker deliberately broke both a Game Boy emulator and an NES emulator, then designed a custom circuit board and panel around the result. Through-hole pins went in by hand with a handheld soldering iron, and the finished control board sits stacked above a second lower board inside the case.
Plenty of small details stand out. The board carries an ESP32-style microcontroller module with a USB port, potentiometers with bare metal shafts, tactile pushbuttons, RCA connectors and a screw terminal block. The faceplate carries black-and-white artwork of a hand and eye alongside the knobs and buttons. In use, twisting and pressing produces glitches, colour shifts and pixel rearrangements of retro game imagery, and the demo distorts the title screens of Pokémon Crystal and Pokémon Silver along with other 8-bit scenes.
One thing still open: there is no canonical BOM published yet, and the schematic is only planned for release after some cleanup. That seems a fair trade-off given the code has already been polished and shared for anyone to fork, and with twenty more units shipping that week and Kickstarter rewards due by mid November, the maker clearly has plenty on the plate.