Back in high school, kids started to hate me cause I had an action replay Pokémon I'm not in to cheating on the dark side, instead I want to see features you can't like the test maps, features that are disabled or features that are enabled but that aren't in the game. I knew although that it's not only to get an unfair advantage apart from others, I just wanted to do what Beta64/Andrew64 was doing. I mostly played Mario games which aren't like a catching, earning, obtaining things game series and all that you really obtain is just more from the game like locked courses that you need to beat courses to get into later. I don't want to cheat because I don't want to complete something without even doing it merely at all, I buy a game and cheat my way to everything and the game won credits? no, cause that's pretty dumb to want to cheat every last game you have without even playing them for the legit and fun experience their intended for achieving.
though you're specifically covering the UK Code Junkies edition, the US did get the exact same device under the GameShark "Shark MX" branding, the one I got came with a US standard rj-11 on both ends (rj-45 is the Ethernet cable plug) It's the exact same hardware inside, so I can say for a fact that the game itself is on a flash rom, so any edits are saved back to the rom itself, same as many new "no battery" bootlegs BennVenn already did reverse engineering on the cart and it can be reflashed with the JoeyJr, it USED TO be able to be reflashed with the Joey Gen3, but due to lack of demand and updates the Joey3's SharkMX support got broken
This seems exactly like one of those things that I would have really wanted as a kid but ultimately would have been disappointed because I had no money and no one to email lol. Also nice Gameboy Color 😉
You actually lucked out after all. I got a similar device as a kid for my yellow pikachu og gameboy for Christmas one year. Pretty sure it was Game Shark branded. Well not only did I have nobody to email, on top of the price of the device you needed to buy internet minutes or something like that on “top up cards” exactly like in the video. Needless to say it was a waste of a gift. I was a sad little kid that day.
@@bengrimmett1239 Oh nice, I believe the person who paid me intended on making a keygen themself so I'll try to let them know that it's been done already
The second I heard that voice in the ad, I knew exactly how bad this product was. Over here (england) that voice in an ad means "this product is overpriced and garbage"
10:54 Maybe they took into consideration, that some people could be tempted to use the device for spam/harassment ? Or maybe after entering too many wrong registration codes/top up cards.
I remember seeing this when I was a kid, and I remember being intrigued (we did not have the internet at the time). However, even though I was just a kid, I realised this would be pretty useless and I'd have rarely, if ever, used it. So I'm glad I didn't pester my parents to buy it. Thanks for the trip down memory lane though.
thank you for sharing this! Absolutely fantastic video!! I've never even heard of this thing and im quite deep into this kinda stuff, so this was a fun surprise! Hope to see more stuff like this from you, loved this video! Great camera work, great editing, and great talking, fun info etc! :D
12:52 I think that was the intended workflow. You do reading and writing mail offline. You're only online after you select Send/Receive. 20 minutes still isn't a lot, but you won't use it all up in one day.
Also I'm pretty sure that's 20 minutes of *connection* time, not time you can spend writing your emails and such. Basically you write your mails, then connect. It'll stay connected for the time it takes to send your email and retrieve any new mails and then disconnect. Or at least, it would if it works like most other portable e-mail devices of the time. Reading email works the same way. Connect, download your new mail, disconnect. You could probably get a decent amount of emails sent for 5 quid.
I miss this era in tech when no one really understood how to take advantage of this new "world wide web" thing, it felt like every company out there was just throwing shit at the wall hoping it stuck and it was so much fun to watch. It always felt like true innovation was taking place because of all the whacky new stuff coming out all the time. Nowadays, everything is so same-y and sterile, the boys at the top have figured it all out and everyone else is just copying them now. It's a shame, but I'm just glad that I grew up in a time when things weren't so uniform and threateningly invasive, because things back then we're just fun old stupid.
I remember seeing this thing advertised on the free VHS tape that came with every GBX Magazine and damn did I want one, it seemed futuristic as hell. I was never allowed one though because my parents didn't want me running up the phone bill (even though that's not how it worked. Parents, right?) and I "didn't have anyone to even send emails to" which in retrospect was fair enough. Edit: Also, Guru Larry Jr. (yes, the one that does the awesome animations on YT) was the one who did the art for that beautifully 2000s anime mascot for GBX.
This was very much "of the time". I believe I got my first cell phone in 2000 and it did hotmail, but it was so expensive that I was asked not to use it (for email), after the first phone bill came in. This device was 2 years a head of BlackBerry and 7 years ahead of iPhones. Everybody knew they wanted portable email, (not to mention portable music/video) but no one knew how. I remember when the DS came out, I was convinced that I wanted it to be a mp3 player, video player, web browser, and PDA. (Basically I wanted a smart phone, before I was really aware of what those were). A few years later I bought a palm pilot, and maybe a year after that, I got HTC touch which was my first smartphone. These ideas made sense at the time, but now it just seems silly.
I am thoroughly enjoying the content you are outputting onto this platform. I believe it is key to educating people about obscure features that may have failed in order for them to not be forgotten.
Yeah, the school I used to go to, I used to call home a lot, and you'd have to dial 9 to go outbound, I believe this is a product of plugging into a PBX (phone-to-phone communication within the building without dialing to the phone company) very common in businesses.
Reminds me of free email from Juno back before AOL got big. You'd basically draft an email and one click to dial and send/receive. Those were the caveman days of the interzones!!
The white phone jack in the UK is known as a BT plug, as named after the main landline telephone service provider British Telecom (or simply rebranded as BT). Fun fact, the landmark called the BT Tower in London takes it's name from the telecommunications company (sidetracking, it used to be called the Post Office Tower). As BT set the jack standards, they became the default, hence the fact no phone wall sockets using RJ11 - only on the device side of things. Ironically, UK broadband use RJ11 from the modem to the phone line, via a microfilter (unless you're on fibre-optic, but that's a different story). I guess at least the phone and modem can't be accidentally plugged the wrong way around...
This was a really stupid idea. I'm from the UK and I can tell you that email in the 90s was almost purely corporate or (in some cases) used to contact distant relatives abroad. It was barely used for anything else. Hell, even text messages weren't massive at that point, most people still made phone calls. This was a terrible idea for our market at that time. Internet in the UK wasn't great in the 90s, with many homes not having it at all and the ones that did, very bad dial-up connections.
I'm from Scotland, but lived abroad for a few years as a kid, so i got this one Christmas when i was home visiting, only to discover via. the set-up line that it only worked within the UK. bastards.
I had one of these! In the states!! It was a whopping dollar in 2001 at an eb and I never got it to work, but i HAD it! It was yellow too, rather than purple. There's a veeeeeeeeeeeeeery slim chance it's still at my parents' house but I think it was trashed many years ago.
Now I want to see someone getting this thing working with a dreampi or something, so that it can connect to the internet and you can send *actual* emails from your gameboy. lmao.
At the beginning email was like regular mail, you probably checked it weekly and this was the way to be as "online" as possible while on the go, I imagine being an early adopter might have been just like having short messaging system (SMS) on current cell phones.
For the year 2000, in the UK this was already kinda outdated but a gimmicky item that people would likely buy nonetheless when it was thrown into the reduction bins in EB and GAME mid-2001, when stores were making space for the upcoming GameBoy Advance. Cellphones at that point were just about rolling out an email option, where until around mid-late 2003 the UK didn't have a somewhat mediocre internet access on the majority of its cellphone providers, while some phones already had it around the year 2000 at a very primitive state (it's laughable 21 years later). Which in the year 2001, Nintendo released a Mobile GameBoy Adapter on the Color (compatible also with the Advance), for Pokémon Crystal and Mario Kart, although that add-on was Japan only and would only be seen in stores selling imports. CodeJunkies (Datel), didn't pursue trying to sell email tools after it became common practice for internet to be a standard feature for consoles. Which it would be interesting to know how much money they made and lost with these World Port cartridges. 😎
@@DasAntiNaziBroetchen The connector he mentioned having never seen before, is common in the UK and (fictional) New Zealand as the end of the landline phone you plug into the wall.
@@hard4games Jason from GameRaveTV very recently (maybe 2 weeks ago) talked about the SharkMX becaused he worked at the company responsible for it at the time. Bundled with the unit was a redemption card, but he doesn´t remember if they sold cards in stores or if you had to call in to top it off.
I was online fairly early on with the C64, and Q-Link services that was pay by the hour in the late 80's/early 90's, and same when the actual internet came around I was using a 486 DX66Mhz with 28.8K/33.6K modem on Win 95 till around 99 when I was in high school working my ass off after school/weekends at a gas station to save up, and build my first real X86 gaming PC(550Mhz AMD K6-2 with a 3DFX Voodoo card). So personally I always saw things like this to get people online as a waste of money I knew would never catch on. Seriously kids do not realize how good they have it with always connected phones in their pockets at crazy internet speeds, and ROKU boxes with so much free content on demand.
With how many obscure peripherals that can be emulated, and how many dead online services have been revived, I'm surprised nobody has reverse engineered this and got it running again.
lul this is amazing, I remember seeing this in Dixons when I was a child. It looked stupid even to 12 year old me. 4:54 also how did they get that GB-MAIL(R) icon to pass the Game Boy's checksum test??
Oh my that looks fun to type on! Never knew of these, seems kinda pricey and inconvenient in all honesty. Would definitely be interested to see the Playstation version too!
I’m just spitballing here, but judging by some other email clients and how the software itself is laid out, it’s possible that you would only connect to the internet to download and upload emails and would be offline for everything else (composing and reading), meaning that your 5 pounds might last quite a while. This also would explain the proprietary save configuration, as this approach takes way more onboard storage.
T9 predictive text was already a thing on phones at the time, plus they were fully wireless and you could do much more than just mail so I can see this thing being dead on arrival.
I think what they were thinking is the Gameboy was the "cool" thing back then, so if you could do something on a "cool" thing, then it would sell. It was likely to expand the amount of people using the Gameboy (for any reason)
I don't think that Typing / Reading counted to that Time. Email Time would usually refer to the Transmission time. The chat-scenario would become costly tho, because you'd refresh all the time.
as someone else mentioned, check out the shark mx. its still super cheap BNIB on ebay, and is /slightly/ better than this. also, theres a keygen online for it so you can actually use it on a gb. great vid
There's an official one I have from japan called the mobile trainer, you could trade pokemon through the internet as well as sending emails. I have japanese pokemon crystal (the only one itll work with) too, but there's no way to actually use it anymore. It'd be very cool if it could be saved.
is there a action replay code to skip the key screen (using code junkies product to brake a code junkies product) or maybe you could ask code junkies there stil around
Technically, you could still go online with this, believe it or not. xD Some modern consumer "routers" let you run modem connections through their RJ11 ports. Mine, for instance, would allow me to hook up an old HP PDA via the modem connection because it really is just a phone. There are even a very tiny amount of callable lines that you can use to go online. Alternatively, if you have a RJ11 to USB adapter of some sort, chances are you could punch a fake phone number into your modem and let it connect to your PC's "virtual gateway". Thus, making this thing go online. However, I have doubts that email servers from today would really respond to anything a Gameboy would want - POP, IMAP and SMTP (mail protocols) usually require TLS (connection encryption) to send anything. Plus, since the codejunkies.com domain probably doesn't hold any email server anymore (haven't checked tho), there is a chance the software wouldn't work and you'd have to falsify any DNS lookup to point to a different server, which would then act as a codejunkies email address. So, long story short: You CAN make it work, but it's not worth it.
If I had to guess the device would only understand the basic modem commands for their service. It wouldn't make much sense for them to implement TCP/IP or POP/SMTP on a Gameboy device. This would also explain the need for the top-up service. But yes it's all very much obsolete :P
There's no dial up connection for it to work, huh. What if...what if there was a way to emulate a dialup connection and either pass it to the Internet or emulate the old services
I despise this idea since you need to connect it to a PC anyway, why not just use the PC itself instead? Where's the convenience in not having a keyboard and having to use a tiny D-pad to perform the same action?
Lots of questions/comments on the modded Game Boy Color I'm using. It was made by danl.man.tie on Instagram. Check him out!
Back in high school, kids started to hate me cause I had an action replay Pokémon
I'm not in to cheating on the dark side, instead I want to see features you can't like the test maps, features that are disabled or features that are enabled but that aren't in the game.
I knew although that it's not only to get an unfair advantage apart from others, I just wanted to do what Beta64/Andrew64 was doing.
I mostly played Mario games which aren't like a catching, earning, obtaining things game series and all that you really obtain is just more from the game like locked courses that you need to beat courses to get into later.
I don't want to cheat because I don't want to complete something without even doing it merely at all, I buy a game and cheat my way to everything and the game won credits? no, cause that's pretty dumb to want to cheat every last game you have without even playing them for the legit and fun experience their intended for achieving.
@@StickFiguresMaster _sure, whatever you say pal._
Has anyone tried to use a VOIP adapter for Analogue modems to try and get this device to function?
though you're specifically covering the UK Code Junkies edition, the US did get the exact same device under the GameShark "Shark MX" branding, the one I got came with a US standard rj-11 on both ends (rj-45 is the Ethernet cable plug)
It's the exact same hardware inside, so I can say for a fact that the game itself is on a flash rom, so any edits are saved back to the rom itself, same as many new "no battery" bootlegs
BennVenn already did reverse engineering on the cart and it can be reflashed with the JoeyJr, it USED TO be able to be reflashed with the Joey Gen3, but due to lack of demand and updates the Joey3's SharkMX support got broken
Similarly japan use mobile adapter GB services connected to cell phone/mobile phone to exchange data such as internet high score
15:37 I used to be an artist for Datel in the early '00s, that's my artwork there ^_^
Got a load more on my DeviantArt page too.
Whoa! That's awesome. Had no idea we were featuring your work. 😀
It's an amazingly small huge world out there.
ew deviantart 🤢🤮🤮🤮
@@hard4games It's something I've kept quiet about over the years.
Sakura says give me £10 off a World Port Larry!
This seems exactly like one of those things that I would have really wanted as a kid but ultimately would have been disappointed because I had no money and no one to email lol. Also nice Gameboy Color 😉
You actually lucked out after all. I got a similar device as a kid for my yellow pikachu og gameboy for Christmas one year. Pretty sure it was Game Shark branded. Well not only did I have nobody to email, on top of the price of the device you needed to buy internet minutes or something like that on “top up cards” exactly like in the video. Needless to say it was a waste of a gift. I was a sad little kid that day.
I still doesnt would have anyone to email today... this device was intended to use like Messenger/WhatsApp today
when you said "free 5pound card" my mind instinctively thought "holy crap that thing is heavy" lol.
we do actually use pounds for *some* weights as well :P
15:24 "Oddware" is noted as software and/or hardware that is odd, forgotten, or obsolete. Thanks, LGR.
Oh, a little while ago someone paid me to reverse engineer a checksum routine for the registration screen on this exact thing!
How complicated was the security?
@@jak3w It wasn't that complicated, writing a keygen wouldn't be very hard
@@UraYukimitsu We wrote one about 5yrs ago, should still be on the net somewhere. SharkMX keygen by bennvenn
@@bengrimmett1239 Oh nice, I believe the person who paid me intended on making a keygen themself so I'll try to let them know that it's been done already
@@bengrimmett1239 is it on github or something?
The Comic Sans font actually fits somewhat well on this.
interesting! reminds me a lot of the workboy, except this one was actually released lol
The second I heard that voice in the ad, I knew exactly how bad this product was.
Over here (england) that voice in an ad means "this product is overpriced and garbage"
The voice actor only accepted trash products hahaha
The Australian guy sounds almost exactly like the British one!
10:54 Maybe they took into consideration, that some people could be tempted to use the device for spam/harassment ?
Or maybe after entering too many wrong registration codes/top up cards.
I bought the US version of this and it was limited to 300 character emails or something low like that. It was interesting but never really used it
I remember seeing this when I was a kid, and I remember being intrigued (we did not have the internet at the time).
However, even though I was just a kid, I realised this would be pretty useless and I'd have rarely, if ever, used it. So I'm glad I didn't pester my parents to buy it.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane though.
been loving the more frequent uploads! crazy to think that people ever wanted to check their email on a gameboy
thank you for sharing this! Absolutely fantastic video!! I've never even heard of this thing and im quite deep into this kinda stuff, so this was a fun surprise! Hope to see more stuff like this from you, loved this video! Great camera work, great editing, and great talking, fun info etc! :D
12:52 I think that was the intended workflow. You do reading and writing mail offline. You're only online after you select Send/Receive. 20 minutes still isn't a lot, but you won't use it all up in one day.
That's so cool! I never knew about this.
Also I'm pretty sure that's 20 minutes of *connection* time, not time you can spend writing your emails and such. Basically you write your mails, then connect. It'll stay connected for the time it takes to send your email and retrieve any new mails and then disconnect. Or at least, it would if it works like most other portable e-mail devices of the time. Reading email works the same way. Connect, download your new mail, disconnect. You could probably get a decent amount of emails sent for 5 quid.
“Can you believe no one bought these?”
I miss this era in tech when no one really understood how to take advantage of this new "world wide web" thing, it felt like every company out there was just throwing shit at the wall hoping it stuck and it was so much fun to watch. It always felt like true innovation was taking place because of all the whacky new stuff coming out all the time. Nowadays, everything is so same-y and sterile, the boys at the top have figured it all out and everyone else is just copying them now. It's a shame, but I'm just glad that I grew up in a time when things weren't so uniform and threateningly invasive, because things back then we're just fun old stupid.
Whatever you say boomer
Whatever you say boomer
@@oldoldmeme OK OK BOOMER
Yep, the internet was like the wild west back then, now it's like a prison state.
The fact that it uses Comic Sans as its font brings me great joy.
Hardware that is odd, forgotten and obsolete
I remember seeing this thing advertised on the free VHS tape that came with every GBX Magazine and damn did I want one, it seemed futuristic as hell. I was never allowed one though because my parents didn't want me running up the phone bill (even though that's not how it worked. Parents, right?) and I "didn't have anyone to even send emails to" which in retrospect was fair enough. Edit: Also, Guru Larry Jr. (yes, the one that does the awesome animations on YT) was the one who did the art for that beautifully 2000s anime mascot for GBX.
This was very much "of the time". I believe I got my first cell phone in 2000 and it did hotmail, but it was so expensive that I was asked not to use it (for email), after the first phone bill came in.
This device was 2 years a head of BlackBerry and 7 years ahead of iPhones. Everybody knew they wanted portable email, (not to mention portable music/video) but no one knew how.
I remember when the DS came out, I was convinced that I wanted it to be a mp3 player, video player, web browser, and PDA. (Basically I wanted a smart phone, before I was really aware of what those were).
A few years later I bought a palm pilot, and maybe a year after that, I got HTC touch which was my first smartphone.
These ideas made sense at the time, but now it just seems silly.
So if your Gameboy has internet, why you ghosting me on tinder?
"We have 'about' screen", "We have a boot screen"
I think you might have made some Canadian brains hurt there xD
I am thoroughly enjoying the content you are outputting onto this platform. I believe it is key to educating people about obscure features that may have failed in order for them to not be forgotten.
Were kids begging to use email? Internet I get.... But email? lol
Yeah, the school I used to go to, I used to call home a lot, and you'd have to dial 9 to go outbound, I believe this is a product of plugging into a PBX (phone-to-phone communication within the building without dialing to the phone company) very common in businesses.
oh wow. the gameboy line sure had some of the weirdest accessories.
Sakura says give me £10 off a World Port!
Hey Hard4Games, have you done a video on the Motorbike Gameboy Colour accessory? I recall it letting you test them among other features.
Reminds me of free email from Juno back before AOL got big. You'd basically draft an email and one click to dial and send/receive. Those were the caveman days of the interzones!!
Is this related to the "Pokedude" thing that GameRaveTV made a video about a little while ago? It sounds very similar.
The white phone jack in the UK is known as a BT plug, as named after the main landline telephone service provider British Telecom (or simply rebranded as BT). Fun fact, the landmark called the BT Tower in London takes it's name from the telecommunications company (sidetracking, it used to be called the Post Office Tower).
As BT set the jack standards, they became the default, hence the fact no phone wall sockets using RJ11 - only on the device side of things. Ironically, UK broadband use RJ11 from the modem to the phone line, via a microfilter (unless you're on fibre-optic, but that's a different story). I guess at least the phone and modem can't be accidentally plugged the wrong way around...
whats the bossa nova music from 1:13 going on?
"But you had to be connected to a phone line anyways... WHY NOT JUST USE A COMPUTER?!"
I love that Tony just keeps on keeping on
TH-cam has ad surveys like that? Never knew, I can't remember when I last saw ads on this site
That Playstation one sounds interesting. I wonder if it ever hit the market?
Your gameboy color looks absolutely sick btw. I love it.
This was a really stupid idea. I'm from the UK and I can tell you that email in the 90s was almost purely corporate or (in some cases) used to contact distant relatives abroad. It was barely used for anything else. Hell, even text messages weren't massive at that point, most people still made phone calls. This was a terrible idea for our market at that time. Internet in the UK wasn't great in the 90s, with many homes not having it at all and the ones that did, very bad dial-up connections.
I'm from Scotland, but lived abroad for a few years as a kid, so i got this one Christmas when i was home visiting, only to discover via. the set-up line that it only worked within the UK. bastards.
I believe it's meant to work like synchronizing a PDA. Back when emails could wait till the end of the day lol
I had one of these! In the states!! It was a whopping dollar in 2001 at an eb and I never got it to work, but i HAD it! It was yellow too, rather than purple. There's a veeeeeeeeeeeeeery slim chance it's still at my parents' house but I think it was trashed many years ago.
I love your custom gameboy, the way the buttons glow looks so cool.
Anyone know where i can get that shell?
Now I want to see someone getting this thing working with a dreampi or something, so that it can connect to the internet and you can send *actual* emails from your gameboy. lmao.
At the beginning email was like regular mail, you probably checked it weekly and this was the way to be as "online" as possible while on the go, I imagine being an early adopter might have been just like having short messaging system (SMS) on current cell phones.
For the year 2000, in the UK this was already kinda outdated but a gimmicky item that people would likely buy nonetheless when it was thrown into the reduction bins in EB and GAME mid-2001, when stores were making space for the upcoming GameBoy Advance. Cellphones at that point were just about rolling out an email option, where until around mid-late 2003 the UK didn't have a somewhat mediocre internet access on the majority of its cellphone providers, while some phones already had it around the year 2000 at a very primitive state (it's laughable 21 years later). Which in the year 2001, Nintendo released a Mobile GameBoy Adapter on the Color (compatible also with the Advance), for Pokémon Crystal and Mario Kart, although that add-on was Japan only and would only be seen in stores selling imports. CodeJunkies (Datel), didn't pursue trying to sell email tools after it became common practice for internet to be a standard feature for consoles. Which it would be interesting to know how much money they made and lost with these World Port cartridges. 😎
I’m still waiting on someone to make a basic custom cellar phone cart for the Gameboy, before I resort to having to make it myself. 🤔😁
I would've loved this if it had come out here. I didn't get to go online at home until several years later.
I was in the UK at the time and never heard of it. That connection is also in New Ze-fictionaland landline walls.
Can you elaborate on what you are trying to say with your latter sentence. I can't make sense of it.
@@DasAntiNaziBroetchen The connector he mentioned having never seen before, is common in the UK and (fictional) New Zealand as the end of the landline phone you plug into the wall.
I think this got released in the USA as Shark MX.
Yeah I remember AVGN going something about the Gameboy and email
Yep!
Oooo God, we had to suffer through this too? Any idea how it was funded? Still phone cards?
@@hard4games Jason from GameRaveTV very recently (maybe 2 weeks ago) talked about the SharkMX becaused he worked at the company responsible for it at the time. Bundled with the unit was a redemption card, but he doesn´t remember if they sold cards in stores or if you had to call in to top it off.
@@hard4games There's someone you might want to talk to about that! th-cam.com/video/yoGKWcl0R9o/w-d-xo.html
I was online fairly early on with the C64, and Q-Link services that was pay by the hour in the late 80's/early 90's, and same when the actual internet came around I was using a 486 DX66Mhz with 28.8K/33.6K modem on Win 95 till around 99 when I was in high school working my ass off after school/weekends at a gas station to save up, and build my first real X86 gaming PC(550Mhz AMD K6-2 with a 3DFX Voodoo card). So personally I always saw things like this to get people online as a waste of money I knew would never catch on. Seriously kids do not realize how good they have it with always connected phones in their pockets at crazy internet speeds, and ROKU boxes with so much free content on demand.
With how many obscure peripherals that can be emulated, and how many dead online services have been revived, I'm surprised nobody has reverse engineered this and got it running again.
I could see this being much more useful if it included a keyboard.
Agree. Anything to speed up the typing.
lul this is amazing, I remember seeing this in Dixons when I was a child. It looked stupid even to 12 year old me.
4:54 also how did they get that GB-MAIL(R) icon to pass the Game Boy's checksum test??
Oh my that looks fun to type on! Never knew of these, seems kinda pricey and inconvenient in all honesty. Would definitely be interested to see the Playstation version too!
I’m just spitballing here, but judging by some other email clients and how the software itself is laid out, it’s possible that you would only connect to the internet to download and upload emails and would be offline for everything else (composing and reading), meaning that your 5 pounds might last quite a while. This also would explain the proprietary save configuration, as this approach takes way more onboard storage.
I convinced my mum to buy me one of these in …2001, maybe? I don’t think we ever actually figured out how to use it. Total fail
T9 predictive text was already a thing on phones at the time, plus they were fully wireless and you could do much more than just mail so I can see this thing being dead on arrival.
I think what they were thinking is the Gameboy was the "cool" thing back then, so if you could do something on a "cool" thing, then it would sell. It was likely to expand the amount of people using the Gameboy (for any reason)
Made for the UK but had # on key 3 instead of £, makes sense.
I don't think that Typing / Reading counted to that Time.
Email Time would usually refer to the Transmission time.
The chat-scenario would become costly tho, because you'd refresh all the time.
The font on the virtual keyboard keys looks like the IBM PC CGA font.
In the US, it was sold as the Gameshark MX
Just imagine if this kind of things worked out and instead of iPhones we've had Gameboys for emails, photos, web browsing... 🤔
as someone else mentioned, check out the shark mx. its still super cheap BNIB on ebay, and is /slightly/ better than this. also, theres a keygen online for it so you can actually use it on a gb. great vid
"yeah man just shoot me a message on my game boy color"
By the far, the most "comforting" dpad keyboard I've seen is on pocketbook 360
Well, thia is one way to annoy those people that are addicted to sending Emails
I have seen this oddity before but my impression has never changed ever since; I just find it a weird device. xD
"E-mail for gamers everywhere!" (where ethernet jacks are available)
There's an official one I have from japan called the mobile trainer, you could trade pokemon through the internet as well as sending emails. I have japanese pokemon crystal (the only one itll work with) too, but there's no way to actually use it anymore. It'd be very cool if it could be saved.
is there a action replay code to skip the key screen (using code junkies product to brake a code junkies product) or maybe you could ask code junkies there stil around
Couldn’t you just create a save state in the emulator to backup anything you entered?
What a beautiful GameBoy Colour!
Good, I am "Toaster Pizza Time" early on the vid.
I lived In the UK In the early 2000s and never saw anything like this
This is the first time I've heard of it and am from and in the UK and first had a Game Boy (Color) in 1999
Your Gameboy is BUSSINNNNNN
Interesting piece of gameboy history
But in japan they use mobile21 services called mobile adapter GB. Mobile 21 is a game developer company joint venture between nintendo and konami
What the heck? Never heard about this before.
It looked like if it could have been combined with Workboy.
From a British person: The phone connector is still a standard here, mainly for phones and phone-based internet connections.
Technically, you could still go online with this, believe it or not. xD
Some modern consumer "routers" let you run modem connections through their RJ11 ports. Mine, for instance, would allow me to hook up an old HP PDA via the modem connection because it really is just a phone. There are even a very tiny amount of callable lines that you can use to go online. Alternatively, if you have a RJ11 to USB adapter of some sort, chances are you could punch a fake phone number into your modem and let it connect to your PC's "virtual gateway". Thus, making this thing go online. However, I have doubts that email servers from today would really respond to anything a Gameboy would want - POP, IMAP and SMTP (mail protocols) usually require TLS (connection encryption) to send anything. Plus, since the codejunkies.com domain probably doesn't hold any email server anymore (haven't checked tho), there is a chance the software wouldn't work and you'd have to falsify any DNS lookup to point to a different server, which would then act as a codejunkies email address. So, long story short: You CAN make it work, but it's not worth it.
If I had to guess the device would only understand the basic modem commands for their service. It wouldn't make much sense for them to implement TCP/IP or POP/SMTP on a Gameboy device. This would also explain the need for the top-up service. But yes it's all very much obsolete :P
So. Can it be hacked to work today?
There's no dial up connection for it to work, huh. What if...what if there was a way to emulate a dialup connection and either pass it to the Internet or emulate the old services
I had no idea Charlie Sheen was into video games...
I miss going to Vipers games
Would this work on the GB Colour?
Theres one of these for sale in a shop near me
This is the EXACT sort of thing I would have been allll about had it came out in the US at the time. This is soooooo me lol.
This probably would had made a killing in the U.S if it came out in the mid 90s.
11:04 you would probably have to break the online services or use mail to do illegal stuff
the artwork at 15:39 looks like Larry Bundy jr's artwork.
Damn, it does!
He confirms it further up in the comments 😁🤓
@@nebular-nerd yeah, but that was before this thread.
@@johnsashes I saw Larry's comment way further up that this thread so was no sure if you had both spotted it, TH-cam can make a jumble of things. 😃
dope, love stuff like this
Dat comic sans
I despise this idea since you need to connect it to a PC anyway, why not just use the PC itself instead? Where's the convenience in not having a keyboard and having to use a tiny D-pad to perform the same action?
This thing plugs directly into a phone socket in the wall. You don't need a PC.
might be a weird question but would you be willing to part with this? I would love to purchase. Let me know!
This seems like they saw the Game.Com and decided they could do it too