First, we had MelonBoy.

A month later, we have PokeBoy, a Mao Shan Wang durian that has been successfully repurposed into a functioning game console.

Durian GameBoy

The bizarre contraption was made by 24-year-old Cedrick Tan, who is currently reading a Double Major in Business Analytics and Marketing at the SMU School of Information Systems.

Tan, who previously used a hollowed out watermelon to encase parts of a GameBoy emulator to create the wacky device, has done something similar with the husk of a durian.

Speaking to Mothership, Tan said that he was challenged by people on Reddit, YouTube, and from his own social circle to attempt making a durian console after the MelonBoy.

He documented the process of creating a durian GameBoy in a video uploaded to his YouTube channel:

How to make a durian GameBoy

In his video, Tan has kindly documented how to turn the spiky king of fruits into the handheld console many of us are familiar with.

First, he removed the durian seeds from the husk, storing the fruit for a snack later on.

Next, Tan washed the insides of the husk and trimmed off some of the white parts, before leaving them to dry.

Afterwards, Tan pieced back the durian husks by using angle brackets and screws to drill it shut.

This is what the durian casing looks like, after some fixing:

After some testing, lots of soldering and some failed attempts, Tan finally made the first version of the PokeBoy.

Friends tried it out, but game crashed after a while

After the device was completed, Tan brought it to school for his friends to try out.

According to Tan, the game started crashing after a while, so he had to go back to fix it.

He also felt incredibly nauseous for the whole day, only to realise that he got mildly poisoned after inhaling too much fume from soldering in his room.

He further explained that the crashing of the game was likely due to a short circuit, as there were many open circuit boards and angle brackets that could've touched and cause short circuits to occur.

Tan changed the design and ported everything onto a Raspberry Pi Zero, and successfully rebuilt the durian GameBoy.

Tan told Mothership that it took him about two weeks to complete this personal project, as he only had a few hours a day to work on it while balancing schoolwork.

He added that constructing a GameBoy using a durian was considerably harder than with a watermelon, partly due to the spikes and tough exterior of the fruit.

Let strangers try out durian GameBoy at shopping malls

Tan later brought the PokeBoy to Funan Shopping Mall to let some strangers try out his device.

A group of youths, who agreed to help "review" his invention, were rather baffled by the hardware of the GameBoy, and commented that "the smell is still there".

Seeming rather impressed by the feat pulled off by Tan, one of them said that the console was very unique, and that he had never seen anything like it before.

However, the group also mentioned that the durian husk made it difficult to play the game.

Another group of boys who tried out the homemade console gave the device a 0/10 for comfort, but a 8/10 for creativity.

Tan also hung around other malls with his durian GameBoy, turning some heads.

He shared that some passers-by stopped to ask him about it, generating some interesting and meaningful conversations.

When asked about his plans for future projects, Tan shared that he is still open to challenging other fruits.

However, when he has more time to spare, he revealed that he will be attempting to make a facial recognition device that will scream "MUM YOU'RE HOME!" in Mandarin whenever it sees his mother coming home.

For more of Tan's exploits, you can head over to his YouTube channel here.

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Top image via Cedishappy/Reddit