Steam Deck Mod Squeezes Valve's Handheld Into a Game Boy-Style Shell
The mod pushes the Steam Deck's miniaturization to an extreme, sacrificing the grip and requiring custom hardware, and its success now hinges on solving the display adapter problem.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Reddit user PhyFawkes is building a Game Boy-sized Steam Deck called SteamBoy. The custom casing holds the motherboard, battery, speakers, buttons, sticks, and trackpads, though the grip is gone. A small fan and heatsink handle cooling. The remaining work is a custom adapter for a VR AMOLED display, which requires BIOS changes. A demo video showed the device running Slay the Spire 2 on an external monitor.
PhyFawkes announced the project on August 9 in the r/SteamDeckModded community, saying the idea came from noticing how small the Steam Deck motherboard is. The vertical casing packs in the motherboard, battery, speakers, buttons, sticks, and the trackpads, but drops the grip-integrated casing entirely.
Cooling comes from a small fan and heatsink bought on AliExpress, mounted on a 3D-printed custom mount, which reportedly cools better than expected. The hardest part remains: a 1200x1080px, 90Hz AMOLED panel designed for VR needs a custom adapter board to connect to the Steam Deck's ribbon cable, plus BIOS modifications.
A demo video showed the device running Slay the Spire 2, but the small LCD on the casing does not work yet, so the game played on a large PC monitor. Triggers are under consideration, though casing capacity makes them difficult.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.