Gaming

This YouTuber made Google Maps playable on Nintendo

Google Maps on the Nintendo might not be that useful, but it's a lot more fun.

April Fools’ is awful. Devising an entire holiday dedicated to willfully deceiving your loved ones or worse, your customers, is basically the definition of setting yourself up for failure. But even with how bad April Fools’ existence is, and the pantheon of pranks gone wrong, we’re left with at least one 8-bit silver lining...

Google Maps x Nintendo

While this port is technically the creation of YouTuber ciciplusplus, it was technically devised by Google in 2012. In this fake April Fools advertisement, Google shows off an 8-bit version of Google Maps for NES with an honest-to-God cartridge.

That port and cartridge are almost exactly what ciciplusplus created by stitching together two existing hacks — one from TheRasteri on YouTube which devises a way of customizing NES cartridges, and this hack from Alastair Aitchison that converts Bing maps to Zelda style 8-bit graphics.

The hardware consists of Raspberry Pi, an FX2LP microcontroller, and the guts from an original NES cart. As noted by Gizmodo, ciciplusplus is currently working on putting the hack inside an actual cartridge housing so that it can be slotted into the NES like a real, physical, game.

While the game definitely looks just like a demo released by Google back in 2012, it’s still a bit lacking in the functionality department. While you can rove the map with the D-pad, you can’t actually search for locations like the original Google demo seen here.

Even if you’ll never actually be able to play Google Maps in cartridge form, it’s great to see Google’s prank finally come to fruition. Now if they could just get this thing on a Tamagotchi, we’ll be in the tech utopia we deserve.

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