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.
I have these neat little single board computers called CHIP https://getchip.com/ And as part of their software package they come preloaded with Pico8! So I figured this would be a perfect platform for setting up a little handheld with.
I wired up the screen to a board and added controls. Wired all these to the appropriate pins on the chip. I went to boot up the system and after some struggling with the configuration of linux managed to get the screen to come up. With the screen working I was able to boot into X and start an nes emulator which didnt really fit well on the tiny screen. X didnt really work all that well itself. I followed some documents on the forum of others that talked about getting it to boot straight into pico 8. It would always crash out on some error. So I never did manage to get it to do much other than run the screen test demo... Sadly this project had to be shelved without figuring out what was going on with it. Also it seems like getting the gpio buttons to work was going to be a challenge. Reading the forums sounded like others were having issues with this too.
Ill need to revisit this one at a later day. I do think this would be a pretty awesome handheld. Maybe I can get Pico 8 working on the esp32, that would be really cool. Had an idea to get lua running on there and then use the open source version of the pico 8 interperter called picolove. I got lua working easy enough. But the scripts for pico love crash... seemed like not enough memory to run. Oh well... on to other projects.
