The world is full of racks, drawers, and shelves built for audio cassettes, and a lot of them aren’t holding cassettes anymore.
Why
I wanted to make some sort of retro container for my Game Boy games. There are people that convert audio cassette cases into Game Boy cases, and maybe I saw those first. I don’t quite remember, but I just remember thinking that would be a great form factor for a little DIY Game Boy game case. I was already making all of these bootlegged Pokémon cartridges for myself, so I thought it’d be really cool to have a series of cases for them. By this point, I had been getting a little bit more familiar with Shapr3D, and I wanted to tackle something with a hinge, and so this was it.
I have all the Game Boy Pokémon games that I built myself in cases like these.
Tape outside, cart inside
Two parts, lid and body, that snap together and hold one DMG or CGB cartridge. Those are Nintendo’s model codes for the original Game Boy and the Game Boy Color. The outside is sized like a standard audio cassette case, and in my real-world tests, that turned out to be the right size. There’s a plain version, meant for custom labels, and a branded version for multicolor printing, with the GAME BOY logo split out into two small pieces, one for the front and one for the spine.
The labels correspond to the Pokémon labels I’d already made for my own carts: Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, and Crystal, on the listing and in the repo. And then I included the template that I use to make those, in case anyone wanted to make their own labels for any other games. I just wanted to make it easier for folks to keep making off what I had already made, if they wanted to. So far, I don’t think anyone has. The template’s set in the ultra-condensed cut of Univers LT Std, which I can’t redistribute; Oswald Bold from Google Fonts is close enough that nobody will call you on it.
The nub
The inside of the lid has a nub on it. I put the nub in there because I didn’t like the idea of the cartridges rattling when you picked them up and moved them around. It’s to keep it in place. People kept complaining about the nub, worrying about it rubbing up against their labels. Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I really didn’t anticipate in any circumstance it would be able to rub against the label. Still don’t. But because people kept complaining, I made No Nub lids.
Printing it
- PLA, PETG, or ABS. PLA’s fine for a shelf. ABS or PETG if the case is going somewhere warm or getting handled a lot
- 0.16 mm layers or finer for a smooth face
- 5% grid infill, meaning the fill pattern inside the walls
- No supports
The hinge
The hinges can be a little bit of a pain. I recognize maybe better engineering could make that easier, and that dry your filament often sounds like a cop-out, but a tuned printer and dry filament, these things tend to print just fine.