A Youtuber with the nickname “stacksmashing” shared a video on March 27, where he converts his 30 years old 8-bit handheld video game console into a mining device for Bitcoin.
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Nintengo Game Boy was initially an electronic device for outputting a video signal or image to illustrate a video game, so users could play via a game controller.Stacksmashing said after Elon Musk's announcement about Tesla allowing BTC purchases, he thought it was time to mine the coin himself. After looking for graphic cards online, it crossed his mind to use his high-end gaming hardware.
He chose the video console, but there were some technical issues. The device was unable to connect with other devices including BTC nodes. So, the experimenter used a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller chip to build an improvised USB adapter and connect the console to his computer.
Afterwards, Stacksmashing downloaded a full Bitcoin node on his PC, built custom mining firmware, and changed a mining program so that it worked on the console instead of a computer. The system worked and with an impressive hash rate (0.8 hashes), the YouTuber informs.