Enlarge / Yup, this is a thing that’s happening in the year 2016… (credit: guacasaurs_mex / Instagram)

I know a surprising number of people who desperately want to play Pokémon Go, but their phones are too old to run the game reliably. For those people, a cheap, used Dreamcast with a portable Visual Memory Unit might be the cheapest way to simulate the Pokémon Go experience until their next upgrade cycle. That’s because of Pokémon Go VMU, a cheeky homebrew project from a VMU coder going by the handle guacasaurus_mex.

True, the Dreamcast’s underpowered memory-card-with-a-screen-and-buttons doesn’t feature the GPS antenna and augmented reality camera that help make Pokémon Go possible on smartphones. Still, guacasaurus_rex promises a randomly generated map grid to navigate on the 48×32 pixel monochrome LCD screen. There will even be a little timing-based mini-game for catching the little monsters in Pokéballs to fill in for those little touchscreen swipes.

The VMU “port” isn’t planned for release until next year, though, because “it’s going to take forever to draw all those damn Pokémon.” Hopefully Pokémon Go will still be a relevant gaming phenomenon by then, eh?