Nearly a decade before the world finally realized the tedious April Fools Day joke, Google unveiled a farce Google Maps 8-bit port for the iconic Nintendo Entertainment System. The joke was quickly forgotten, but not by a manufacturer, who, nine years later, has made the NES version of Google Maps a reality.
Although Google provided an online demo at the time, it was never intended to be a fully functional NES cartridge version of the mapping service (nor the Game Boy version Google too burlat), but it turns out that the idea was very technically feasible. YouTuber’s “ciciplusplus” used two other smart hacks as a starting point for its 8-bit version of Google Maps: Guide to Creating Your Own Custom NES Cartridge by YouTuber ‘TheRasteri‘, and this work of Alastair Aitchison this makes Bing Maps aerial images what they look like The legend of Zelda world map.
If the world you see through ciciplusplus’ 8-bit Google Maps conversion looks very familiar, it’s because the images generated by Google’s map service become a 16×16 grid, with the colors of each grid averaged and replaced by a matching pixelated image based on graphical tiles used in the original NES version of The legend of Zelda.
The hardware that powers what might be the most boring game on the NES is pretty straightforward and includes a Raspberry Pi, an FX2LP microcontroller, and the entrails of an official NES car that sacrificed his life for the cause. Finally, all hardware will be squeezed inside the original cartridge case so that it can be loaded into the game slot of the console, but it is an update that appears to appear in the ciciplusplus to-do list, including features such as search of specific sites. For now, fun hacking works, and with an amazing amount of interactivity using an NES gamepad to scroll around the map and zoom in and out of the image, with automatically generated place names using the NES instantly recognizable font. The next time you are told that the princess is in another castle, you will finally be able to get directions.