Handheld Gaming
NES in a NES Controller
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.
NES Handheld
The Micro NES
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.
Smaller Pi Zero RetroPie
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.
Commodore 64 Handheld
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
ESP8266 Arduboys
Have you seen the ArduBoy? This thing is really cool! A thin tiny game system. Based on Arduino and programmed via the Arduino IDE. There are quite a few games developed for it. And a lot of them are really great fun. The software running these is open source and easily modified. Given that I want to build my own stuff I decided to take a stab at getting the system to run on the arduino compatible esp8266.