My idea of incorporating a NES console within the NES controller seemed exciting, and now it has come to fruition through this project. The controller now features a compact screen in the middle that supports an emulator capable of running all NES games.

To enable this functionality, I had to perform various firmware updates and also added support for multiple games.

This is a pretty fun project. I seen these new chips called the esp32 came out and they are basically IOT system on a chip wifi bluetooth etc... at a very low cost. They are the successor to the esp8266, a very popular wifi chip. The difference being these new chips have a dual core processor, more memory, and a pretty nice clock speed. All in a tiny footprint. I thought wow, these are pretty great, I wonder what cool stuff can be made with them.

We had a big open house party at work for our new office opening. I wanted to do something fun and special for it. I had this idea what if we were to make our own gummies. Everyone loves some gummies right?

I thought well we probably can get away with just designing a mold and then printing a few of them and just pouring the gummies into the printed mold and it will be all good... 

The raspberry pi zero is a pretty small device and amazingly capable for emulating gaming systems. I wanted to try and build a small but playable game handheld. 

This is running the wonderful RetroPie system https://retropie.org.uk/

Here I took a 1.44in 128x128 screen. Wired that to the pi zero over spi. 

The controls are wried in over gpio, using small tact switches. 

I threw on a 1200mah battery. This should give it a pretty nice battery life. 

Pico 8 is this really cool fantasy gaming console. https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

It has games that come on rom carts, it has its own neat little boot screen and old 8 bit feel. The games themself are really quite good and a lot of fun. And the native resolution is only 128x128. This all sounded perfect to me to build out a tiny game handheld based on. Since the screen resolution is the same as the 1.44in tft lcd screens I have I figured these would be perfect for this build.

Oh the Commodore 64, this was the machine of my youth. The thing I learned to program on. And had so many years of great times with. It is such a fun system with a wealth of games made for it. Always dreamed of having a portable version of this iconic system. Over the years dreamed of ways to build such a device. And now it is possible