February 3, 2005

11:38 PM

I saw a cool microcontroller project on slashdot, and dredged up my old dream of making an open-source, open-spec competitor to the GameBoy. Surely somebody else out there is doing that kind of thing (not GameBoy programming, but making entirely different handheld game devices).

What's the best forum, resource, or website to pursue information about this kind of project?
posted by Emera Gratia to (4 comments total)

I'm not an expert on these things but I've dabbled a bit. Like that's stopped anyone on askme before, but here goes:

You should definitely check out some books on basic stamp programming. The stamp is a simple programmable microcontroller which is inexpensive. The robot store sells them here.

After you've gotten the hang of stamp microcontroller programming you should move up to a more powerful platform as the basic stamps might not have enough power/IO for your needs. A PIC microcontroller is the next step up and it might be enough to drive a gameboy-like device, albeit you can kiss color and anything that needs more than 8k of RAM goodbye.

Up from there you're going to be dealing with vendor stuff with their own SDKs like ARM processors, Intel's mobile offerings, etc. I don't know much about these other than they typically power high-end PDAs and other embedded devices and they are pricey compared to stamp/stamp II and PIC.

You may want to check out some embedded computing sites, robotics newsgroups, etc.
posted by skallas at 12:45 AM on February 4, 2005

It'd be nice, but you have a big roadblock in front of you: controlling your display. If you go generic, you have to get a soudn chip, a display device and a driver that you can interface to your CPU and that will drive up the cost. Whereas a company like Nintendo chooses a processor, a sound chip, a display and a driver chip and then pays the CPU manufacturer to integrate the the CPU, sound, and driver chips because they can afford to especially when the cost is amortized over several million chips.

The upside is that the proliferation of cellphones and PDAs are creating a secondary market for companies that want to make embedded systems set to go for handheld devices. For example, Motorola's Dragonball processors are 3.3V microcontrollers that are 68K based and can have built-in LCD drivers. You can find StrongARM chips that are doing the same thing.
posted by plinth at 6:21 AM on February 4, 2005

[Without knowing your background or tools available:] It won't be easy. Look at this inspiring project: XGameStation. Also look at the great FPGA Arcade.

You're definitely going to need to get your own boards printed and access to a pick/place or serious surface-mount/BGA tools to do standalone runs. Microcontrollers are usually far easier because you can get them in DIP packages, which anyone can solder. But I don't know of anything powerful enough to drive a LCD, do video processing and audio processing that comes in a DIP. There's some good stuff on getting the popular Atmel micros to do video out and you certainly can do sound, but those things top out at 20Mhz, you're barely going to get pong running on one. [The Gameboy has specialized hardware for sound and video, so the relatively weak 4Mhz processor (in the GBC) can concentrate solely on game stuff.]

You'd be better off starting with a development board like the XGS one or a DSP board with a composite video out (I like the Analog Devices Blackfin, but the tools are $$$$ and Windows-only.) Also, the aforementioned 68k chips might be a good bet, I'm sure there's dev boards for them with LCD connections. Also, the ARM7 is a good bet. Then once you get prototypes working on the dev tools, find $5,000 from somewhere and make a run of 10. Sadly, the numbers don't work out for the little guy.
posted by neustile at 7:05 AM on February 4, 2005

Emera- I'm pretty sure this will lead you to the path you're looking for. And maybe this.
posted by TuxHeDoh at 7:39 AM on February 4, 2005