ModRetro announced yesterday that its Chromatic handheld game system is back in stock and ready to ship starting at $200.
It’s a labor of love, created by retro-minded people like Palmer Luckey — yep, the creator of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and now founder of defense contractor Anduril.
ModRetro’s name itself is a nod to Luckey’s early years, when at the age of 12 he created a forum for technology enthusiasts, ModRetro.com. It was the virtual place where, among other things, Luckey learned all about VR.
One of the things Luckey admired was the Game Boy Color, and Chromatic is an homage to that machine with pixel-accurate colors. Torin Herndon, CEO of ModRetro, said in an interview with GamesBeat that retro purists will see that accuracy in the gameplay. Herndon, who worked as an engineer alongside Luckey’s team, made Luckey’s dream of the Chromatic come to life.
The Chromatic debuts at the end of 2024 and it sold out. Now it’s back with a larger supply, new games, a new colorway and more tweaks.
Herndon said the Chromatic was meticulously crafted as a handheld tribute to the Game Boy Color and it is “permanently” back in stock.
Lauded for its premium cold-touch magnesium build, first-of-its-kind pixel-perfect display, and library of original and classic games, Chromatic is built for both purists and newcomers alike.
With Chromatic’s re-stock, the brand is unveiling a full ecosystem of new features and high-quality accessories to bring even more functionality, along with a new colorway and game titles ranging from story-driven adventures to nostalgic re-releases.
Its growing library includes Sabrina: The Animated Series – Zapped!, bringing back the 2000s TV-favorite with puzzle-based gameplay and standout visuals that shine on Chromatic’s pixel-perfect display.
All units come bundled with Chromatic Tetris and an evolving software platform unlike anything else in the category. The Chromatic is backed by ModRetro’s ongoing support and updates, which include two major feature drops since launch. Kicking things off, ModRetro is unveiling:
Game Launches
- Sabrina: The Animated Series – Zapped!: A re-release of the fast-paced platformer based on the cartoon series, where you switch between Sabrina and Salem to reverse a magical mishap.
- Wicked Plague: A side-scrolling Metroidvania with fast-paced action, haunting visuals, and intense boss fights in a cursed tower.
- Self-Simulated: A high-speed precision platformer with over 100 levels, customizable assists, and a story about reclaiming your lost identity.
- First Contact Protocol: An adventure-puzzle game with branching choices, cinematic cutscenes, and a crew fighting to survive aboard a damaged starship.
- Gravitorque: A puzzle platformer where you control gravity instead of jumping, solving mind-bending levels across four distinct worlds.
New Accessories
- ModRetro Rechargeable Power Core ($30): Snap-in battery for up to 16 hours of gameplay.
- ModRetro Link Cable ($15): Bring back couch co-op with head-to-head multiplayer support.
- ModRetro Mod Kit ($15): Personalize or refresh with high-quality, swappable parts and one of a kind dual sided screwdriver.
- ModRetro Koss Porta Pro ($50): A color-matched retro headset with legendary sound.
Software Features
- Streaming support: Chromatic (including First Edition) can now stream gameplay natively to Discord, Mac, and PC, no extra hardware required.
- Cart Clinic: Through the Chromatic, this tool allows ModRetro cartridges to receive updates and new content without having to replace the physical cart.
Chromatic is now available at modretro.com in seven colorways, including the new ‘Cloud’ colorway, and two display options: Gorilla Glass ($200) for scratch resistance and excellent drop protection, or Sapphire Glass ($300) for near diamond hardness, typically reserved for ultra high-end time pieces.
In addition, the company is preparing to announce more later this year, including partnerships with some of gaming’s most iconic names — Ubisoft, Atari, and Argonaut Games. Full details will be revealed at a later date.
The view from the designer
Right out of college, Herndon went to work at Oculus VR as a product designer on the Oculus Rift.
“Kind of by happenstance, I sat next to I sat next to Palmer and some of his other friends who were the original founders of Oculus when I was working at Facebook. And all of those original founders of Oculus were from the ModRetro forums,” Herndon said.
He added, “That website is basically a place for hardware hackers to congregate. The main focus was to work on modifying classic gaming consoles. And then there was also this offshoot of thinking about virtual reality and that’s where Palmer put together the early Oculus team.”
Herndon laughed as he said most people thought the teen Luckey was a 40-year-old engineer working at a tech company.
“He was actually just a child,” Herndon said.
Herndon worked at Oculus after Facebook (now Meta) bought it for $2 billion. He stayed through the period of launching the Rift and after Luckey was fired by Mark Zuckerberg in March 2017.
(At the time, Luckey got into hot water on social media after he financed an anti-Hillary Clinton billboard. On social media, he was cast as a hatemonger — something he denied. But Zuckerberg didn’t sympathize with him and wound up firing Luckey. In a coda, Zuckerberg and Luckey recently buried the hatchet and Meta announced a partnership with Luckey’s Anduril Industries, which was recently valued at $30.5 billion for its use of AI in making military weapons. In the meantime, Luckey revived his dream of ModRetro. He’s still a controversial figure, but he is definitely a tech enthusiast).
Herndon joined Luckey at Anduril for a time and became Luckey’s “personal engineer of sorts.”
“I basically built all of Palmer’s weird, extreme machines. I’m actually in a garage right now, doing just weird, crazy projects that Palmer likes to work on outside of his regular day job,” Herndon said. “And one of the projects on my list, he said, was to build an ultimate Game Boy. And so the entire concept of Chromatic is Palmer’s brainchild, and I simply shepherded the product because I fell in love with the idea.”
Herndon grew up in the 1990s, and as a kid he played Pokémon on a Game Boy Color.
“I had that memory and that nostalgia like everybody else and and Palmer’s vision for what he wanted to do was to recreate an experience of that super iconic format,” said Herndon. “It was ridiculous. It was something that nobody would ever attempt to do unless it was Palmer, to be honest. And all this centered around the idea of creating a pixel-perfect resolution display.”
Designing the screen
The Chromatic has a 160 pixel by 144 pixel color display that is 2.56 inches diagonally And it is the only one that has been made since the original Game Boy Color with its reflective display with no backlight.
“Palmer’s concept, and what he asked me to try to execute, was to recreate a modern display at the same pixel resolution in the same pixel pitch as the original Game Boy. And the reason why that was so important is because when people were designing graphics for Game Boy games back in those days, the subpixels themselves were so large that art was drawn in the subpixel layer,” Herndon said.
He added, “People don’t really realize this because most people honestly just don’t care, but you could virtually increase the resolution of the display by using the pure R, the pure G or the pure B. So like a Pikachu cheeks or Pikachu eyes would have red glints.”
If you display Game Boy games in an upscaled way, you can create a display that is 10 times upscaled. But it blurs the art across multiple pixels and you lose fidelity in the subpixel layer.
“That’s why we went into this crazy project, to make this one-off display, which was truly custom from the thin-film transistor layer. And we did this engineering project really just between Palmer and me, and the result was so cool that we thought it was worthy of resurrecting that ModRetro name and making the Chromatic a flagship product under that brand,” Herndon said.
The 2.56-inch screen was dedicated by the pixel pitch. If the pixels are 160 wide and the pitch for a single pixel is .2 millimeters, that dictates the 2.56-inch diagonal pitch, Herndon said.
One of the differences compared to the Game Boy Color is that the screen is backlit as it uses a modern LCD IPS display. The display has modern LCD benefits like the IPS and backlight, but the backbone of the display is completely custom, “which allows us to get perfectly accurate pixels.”
The electronics design is embedded in a chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Such chips can be updated with program updates even after they are built and embedded in equipment.
“The FPGA code that runs on this device is effectively like a Game Boy Color CPU, cycle for cycle. So when Chromatic is playing Game Boy games, it’s acting like a Game Boy Color would, in terms of playing a Game Boy game,” Herndon said.
The Chromatic also has a microcontroller on board that handles auxiliary functions, like pulling up the menu or controlling the brightness. The company chose not to design its own application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) because the engineering cost is in the millions just to design it. Such chips also have be correct the first time, as they can’t be updated in the field. With all the quirks of old games, the device needed an FPGA.
FPGAs also used to be expensive, but they’ve come down over time and now they’re capable of emulating older CPUs at a low cost.
“We do everything from scratch, and so we’re fitting the CPU emulation into a much smaller FPGA than somebody has previously done. So this is probably, this is the most cost-efficient use of an FPGA for Game Boy emulation that has been done so far,” Herndon said.
ModRetro has ported the CPU to the FPGA and also open-sourced it to a different chip that is cheaper and more efficient.
The games are physical
The Chromatic doesn’t read ROMs, which often have pirated or emulated games. But if a modded game or emulated game is in a physical cartridge, it can be readable in the Chromatic.
“We’ve been pretty aggressive about taking a hard stance on the physical format, for all the reasons that everybody is aware of around just wanting to have that experience of owning your physical media, being able to trade it with people,” Herndon said.
He added, “But there’s also a larger reason, which is that we both want to, we want to go to classic IP houses to re-release games with us, and also the place where indie developers are interested in this format would want to release their games. And by putting these games into the physical format and adding that additional value around the collectability of it, we can basically pay developers a higher royalty than what a digital game would be able to justify.”
When you open the game packages, you’ll see they have a manual inside. Herndon finds that to be cool. And there’s a charm specific to the game that can hang on the side of your Chromatic. (I hung the S-11 game charm on the one I have).
Reverse engineering
As for interaction with Nintendo, ModRetro hasn’t had any contact yet. Herndon said his company studied every patent for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. Many of those patents have since expired. The Game Boy Color came out in 1998, or 27 years ago, and patents last for just 17 years.
To avoid any problems, ModRetro reverse-engineered the BIOS in a “black box,” since the Game Boy Color BIOS had a Nintendo logo pop up upon booting it, he said.
“In our case, we just have our own BIOS code that is booting these games, and that’s why you don’t see any additional logos or handshakes between the game and the console,” Herndon said. “We took the long and painful route of doing this extremely carefully.”
Sadly, Herndon said if you go to a retro gaming expo, and you see them selling Pokemon games at the booths, almost every single one is a counterfeit game.
“It’s just it’s so rampant in every category, and we think that a device like this and our efforts in legally licensing things and reproducing these games could basically allow classic IP holders to re-monetize games that are currently just sold counterfeit,” Herndon said.
There is a secondary market for old cartridges, but those sell at a high price.
The Chromatic 32-pin cartridges are actually built to last, while the original cartridges degrade over time as the contacts don’t last. The Chromatic cartridges have FRAM, a memory chip that lasts — perhaps as long as 100 years.
The shell of the device is made out of magnesium, and so it’s pretty heavy. It gifts you the stiffness of something like a cell phone. But magnesium is lighter than aluminum. There are screws that hold it together, and that is a nod to allowing the device to be modded. Like everything else in the Chromatic, even the screws are custom designed.
Getting it done
ModRetro incorporated in 2023. There was a lot of prep work. But all of this design work took perhaps six months to get done with a team of two people, plus a few other helpers. But Luckey had been talking about doing this for more than a decade. Other manufacturers would have laughed them out of the room.
“This was something where we were pretty confident, through this amount of time of designing consumer electronics together, that we could build something where basically every single component in it is custom and very strange,” he said.
The team created their own version of Tetris as a tribute to their favorite game. There are 10 games that are available now and there are more in the pipeline. The games have the original music. Over the life of the Game Boy Color, there were hundreds of games.
The larger games like Dragonyhm had four megabytes of data. That’s why memory optimization was a huge part of the programming task for these games.
After the team put the device on the market, the No. 1 piece of feedback was that people wanted different colors for the devices. (I got the midnight black one).
One of the unusual parts is the device has a USB-C connector, which can be used for updating the device via the FPGA. When the device is plugged in via USB-C, it will pull the electric charge via the cable and bypass the double-A batteries. The batteries last a day, and you can easily change them out yourself, in contrast to most smartphone batteries.
If someone wanted to play a pirated game on a cartridge, they could do that and the Chromatic doesn’t stop that. The company has open-sourced its code. The device is being assembled in Mexico and Herndon is expecting that to be a tariff-safe location, but there is no guarantee on that yet. So far, there has been no need to change the price.
“Palmer is a freaking encyclopedia when it comes to consumer electronics,” Herndon said. “He’s in his 30s, but he has always had that old soul when it comes to consumer electronics.”
It’s hard to say how big a market exists for the Chromatic. Nintendo sold more than 100 million Game Boy devices, and many of those people are now 30 to 50 years old. They have a lot of money, presumably.
“Most of them are still alive. Most of those people today who owned Game Boy and enjoyed Game Boy probably don’t really consider themselves gamers,” Herndon said. “People always talk about playing games when they were kids.”
But this is not likely to be a big cash grab for Luckey, who probably doesn’t really need a whole lot more money anymore. It’s a labor of love.
Hands-on gameplay
I’ve been playing around with the Chromatic for some days. I’ve enjoyed it. At first, when I tried the Dragonyhm game, it didn’t work. But then it started up after I took it out and turned of the power and started over again. It was an exploratory adventure game and I’ve only cracked the surface of it.
I think my favorite of the batch so far is Project S-11, a game originally developed by Paragon 5 and published by Sunsoft for the Game Boy Color. It was released in North America on January 3, 2001. I felt like I was playing a little piece of history.
Herndon said Project S-11 is an example of a game that really pushed the limits of the platform. You control a sci-fi spaceship on a 2D top-to-bottom scrolling screen. Enemies come into your view and spray all kinds of projectiles at you. You have to dodge and escape while shooting back, much like in the old Galaga game. When you take out some of the bigger enemies (either in the air or on the ground), they leave a powerup on the screen that you can pick up. When you do, you get an upgrade for your weapons.
“When you play that game, you’ll notice that it feels almost too modern because you can plug that game in and it’s pretty shocking that it’s a Game Boy Color game. It feels like a much more modern.
But I also enjoyed Tetris on the Chromatic. It shows of the color screen and it is simple enough to control with the D-pad and buttons. It’s easy to get into the mode where you get into a rhythm in the game. There aren’t so many controls that you accidentally hit the wrong buttons all of the time. But this is also the kind of game that you can get easily on your smartphone. And it looks better on the smartphone. So you really have to be a dedicated player to like the Chromatic more than your smartphone gaming device.
I very much admire the engineering work that has gone into the Chromatic. It is authentic and pure, as it is intended for fellow fanatics. I almost love that story more than the device. But I have also found myself getting absorbed in games that I can play in a short time on the run. And so it is growing on me.
I would give this a solid 4.5 stars out of 5.
Disclosure: ModRetro provided me with a Chromatic and games for the purpose of this review.