#retro-gaming

The Game Boy Camera was brilliant and stupid in equal measure, a 128x112 pixel sensor bolted on top of a cartridge, printing to thermal paper on a Game Boy Printer the size of a brick. I got both for Christmas when I was 12 and somehow spent hours with them. The minigames are absurd, the image quality is aggressively awful, and the whole thing looks like a prop from a cheap sci-fi film. I loved it.

In 2007 I was deep in the DS flashcart scene, cycling through a string of carts. GBATemp threads, firmware drama, custom skins, compatibility lists. By 2009 I’d moved on. Nearly twenty years later, the DS Pico has pulled me right back in. Open-source, built around an RP2040, and around £10 from Chiscart on AliExpress. I’ve bought three.

A banned Switch sitting on a shelf is prime hardware for Android. Turns out the Tegra X1 that powered Breath of the Wild runs a full Android OS surprisingly well.

Back in 2015 when I reviewed devices like the GPD XD and similar Android handhelds, the whole ecosystem felt half-baked. Emulation wasn’t particularly good yet, the devices came from obscure Chinese manufacturers, the ROMs were loaded with questionable apps, and the SOCs couldn’t handle much.

The GPi Case is a fancy case for the Raspberry Pi Zero that gives you a screen, speaker, buttons and battery in a design reminiscent of the original DMG-001 Classic Game Boy. I’ve got mine set up to emulate some old game consoles. It’s great. As the GPi Case uses a Raspberry Pi at its core, you can use it to run more than just game emulators. The Raspberry Pi plays Pico-8 games wonderfully (Pico-8 officially supports Raspberry Pi as a platform, too!). I’d always wanted a dedicated Pico-8 console, so the GPi fits the bill perfectly. I bought a second GPi cartridge to make a dedicated Pico-8 cart for my GPi. It contains a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an 8GB Micro SD card with a stripped-down Retropie that boots straight to the Pico-8 splore menu so you can immediately find and launch Pico-8 games made by the community. I put these labels together using found assets and the Pico-8 logo. You can print them on paper and then just glue or tape them onto the cartridge case. Printed dimensions should be: Width: 39.5mm Height: 22.75mm

I’ve been playing with this Pocket Sprite a bit lately. It’s a tiny ESP32-based device that can emulate Gameboy, NES and various other classic game systems.

Today I’m refreshed to be reviewing a console that doesn’t try to cram too much in to the form factor, but instead tried to focus on doing one thing well.

I always find it hard to find things to write about when I have a blog. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s just I don’t like writing. I’ve been busy this past week, creating a new community for the Dingoo A320 portable game device. The community is called “Dingoonity” and is available at http://dingoonity.org I’ve been constantly working on improving Dingoonity since it launched on Friday at 7pm, and so I’ve had little time to work on much else. Dingoonity features a Simple Machines Forum powered BBS, and since today a SMF powered news page which I wrote using SMF’s SSI.php functions. Working on this project has been a great experience so far. The Dingoo community is very much alive and crunching out new homebrew releases for both the Dingoo official firmware, and the “Dingux” linux port for the Dingoo. I will probably post some more Dingoonity-related posts later, aswell as updating my portfolio with the Dingoonity designs when I finish the tweaks.

Enjoy Unable to recover the image :(

Another theme for the R4DS, this time Vista! Unable to recover the image :(

This is the first of my themes created for the R4DS nintendo DS flash cartridge. Unable to recover the image :(

This is my second theme created for the R4DS nintendo DS flash cartridge. Unable to recover the image :(