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DIY Steam Deck Rebuild Pairs a Game Boy-Style Body With a Physical Keyboard
Handheld gaming PCs tend to put their controls on either side of a wide screen, leaving the Game Boy layout to retro machines. This DIY Steam Deck rebuild brings that upright silhouette into PC gaming, with a 5.5-inch display, two thumbsticks, and a physical keyboard squeezed into a 3D-printed body. It’s a different answer to what a portable gaming PC should look like.
The trick starts with a Steam Deck motherboard, which is paired with a smaller LCD and parts sourced from a broken Deck. Rather than copying Valve’s enclosure, the new shell stacks the screen, keyboard, and gaming controls vertically. The screen itself remains horizontal, of course. It’s the arrangement around it that changes, putting the display above your hands instead of between them.
Designer: LCLDIY
That keyboard is where the project wanders away from a simple nostalgia exercise. Rows of tiny circular keys occupy the space between the display and controller buttons, complete with a number row and letter keys. Red WASD keys stand out among the black ones, making the PC connection hard to miss. This Game Boy relative has considerably more to say for itself.
Having physical keys could make entering a search term, naming a save, or typing a message less dependent on an on-screen keyboard. You wouldn’t have to surrender part of the display just to bring up the letters. Those small, tightly packed buttons don’t promise laptop-like typing, however. They’re better understood as a compact input option than an invitation to write your novel.
Below the keyboard, two red thumbsticks flank a black directional pad and four red face buttons. The white enclosure keeps those clusters visually distinct, despite the unusually busy front. Your thumbs work beneath the screen rather than alongside it, while typing means reaching farther up the body. The layout separates playing and text entry spatially, even though both happen on the same surface.
Building that arrangement takes more than finding an empty shell. The project includes a custom circuit board populated with small switches, along with firmware and a case modeled around the replacement display, using water-soluble printing material for finer detail. Soldering and programming are part of the work, so this isn’t a housing you snap around an otherwise untouched handheld.
The project carries a Windows-oriented title, but the handheld retains SteamOS. That’s an important distinction, since Valve’s Proton compatibility layer lets supported Windows games run on Linux without installing Windows. The build therefore shouldn’t be mistaken for a confirmed Windows conversion. Its familiar Steam interface also says little about frame rates or how individual games handle the revised hardware.
Weight, battery life, and cooling performance aren’t documented, so the upright shape shouldn’t be mistaken for a proven comfort upgrade. There’s more to reach around than on an original Game Boy, especially with that keyboard separating screen and sticks. The nostalgic outline survives, but its simple controls have given way to something your childhood handheld never needed: a place for the Ctrl key.
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