Forget The Steam Deck, This Balatro Fan Is Playing On DS
Someone Just Made Balatro Playable On A Nintendo DS
Downloading Balatro on Steam Deck dealt me a pretty dangerous hand. Suddenly I could lie in bed and lose hours whittling away at each ante, or swap out my book for a quick game (or ten) at a coffee shop. I'm not even going to think about the mobile port and the all-consuming obsession it might bring. But one fan has taken things even further, getting the game to run on a Nintendo DS.
I hate to insult the millennials reading this (and the millennials I work with), but the DS is pretty retro these days. Yes, even the DSi — it launched in 2008, nearly 20 years ago. So while Balatro isn't the most demanding game, it can't exactly be ported to an old handheld 1:1 without cutting a few corners.
Thankfully, Reddit user kooler_duck had a solution. They booted up the fan-made Balatro GBA demake on a modded DSi through GBARunner2, a hypervisor that runs GBA games on DS, DSi, and 3DS handhelds. "If it has a screen, I WILL play Balatro on it," they posted.
What's Different About This Fan-Made Version Of Balatro?
It's a wildly impressive feat of modding, squeezing Balatro onto hardware from 2008, and unlike playing the native port on Steam Deck, the fan-made GBA version of Balatro isn't nearly as difficult to put down. That's because getting the game to work on "a device with less processing power than a modern graphing calculator" (as kooler_duck puts it, referencing the GBA) means a lot of it has been stripped out, essentially leaving us with a what-if? tech demo that reimagines Balatro as a retro classic.
"This project is a non-profit fan demake of Balatro for the Game Boy Advance, meant to recreate it as accurately as possible including all the visuals that make it satisfying to play," the Github description reads. "It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Playstack or LocalThunk and is not to be sold."
It's a testament to just how much enthusiasm Balatro has inspired that fans are already finding ways to cram it onto hardware Nintendo stopped making years ago. As OP put it, if it has a screen, someone is probably trying to play Balatro on it. It might just be the new Doom.