An unusual accessory for the Super Nintendo (Super Famicom) entertainment system, the Super Game Boy was designed to run Game Boy games on a full-sized TV screen. The advantage was that users could sit at a comfortable distance from the brightly-colored TV instead of staring closely at a non-backlit LCD. A few games, notably Donkey Kong Land (Donkey Kong GB) for Game Boy featured additional borders and graphics that would display around the screen. All of the games were presented in at least some kind of color: while the more advanced games had color codes pre-programmed into the unit, users could use the extra buttons on the SNES game pad to switch pallettes to their liking.
Because of the primitive nature of Game Boy games and the pervasiveness of the Game Boy hardware (particularly among hardcore gamers) the Super Game Boy was a modest success at best. Its successor, the Super Game Boy 2, featured a distinctive translucent blue casing three years before the iMac did. Sold mainly in Japan but sporadically elsewhere, the Super Game Boy 2 allowed a Super NES and Game Boy to be connected by a link cable.
The Super Game Boy does not accept Game Boy Advance (GBA) games. For GBA games, there are two options to play on a TV: an internal kit called GBATV (about $70) will let you connect your GBA directly to a television, and the GameCube Game Boy Player (about $50) will add GBA playability on the Nintendo GameCube.