So, together with a friend, we have decided to make our own console for fun and giggles. This surely is an undertaking but this is an idea we were considering for a long time and as we got more and more experienced with circuits, embedded programming, 3d printing and stuff like that, I feel like it would be finally in our reach.

I never really looked at other people's similar projects, I have no idea what I'm doing honestly, but I can write code and I can use google so I think we will figure it out and get there eventually.

I will post our progress in this thread.

Since I know pretty much noting about electronics, my friend will be taking care of designing the hardware. It will take a while and since I also do not want to start "production" before I know if this all even makes any sense, I decided to get all the components and assemble a sort of dev board to test things on first. Today I got all the parts needed so I can try to get something working.

Just so you're aware there is a decently large industry for single board computer handheld emulator devices.
I'm not telling you to just buy one but I am bringing this up because if you use a common chipset it is feasible that you could steal a compatible operating system easily so you can focus on the hardware side of things.
E.g. Anbernic Rg35xx
See: retrogamecorps on youtube

I did not expected to have to solder pins, but I guess it won't be a problem with some more flux.
However, the problem is that this esp module is too thick for the breadboard. I really do not want to route all the wires under it.
Should I have gotten two and put the module across two of them?

>>2932435
Well, honestly, I am more interested in the software side. Like I said, I won't be designing hardware, it's what my friend just wants to do.

>>2932429 (OP)
Just build a portable wii or something. You'll want to kill yourself less afterwards.

>>2932429 (OP)
https://www.hackster.io/megazoid/crokpocket-a0ff83

Fuck, I pasted everything without realizing there is a protective foil on this plate.

>>2932466
Yea, but that's just hardware modification, it's boring.

>>2932559
That's cool. Maybe we can use this to figure out how to do d-pad. The problem with d-pad is that we are quite limited in space AFAIK.

>>2932429 (OP)
None of these chips have clock rates > 1 GHz or RAM in excess of 1 GB. You can't emulate much on that. Unless you're slapping a FPGA in there you need at least 1 GHz clock rate and 1 GB RAM to emulate everything SNES and before.

A FPGA would also allow you to prototype hardware for what is essentially your motherboard, so you could design it in the FPGA with the plan to integrate it with the FPGA. Then from there implement it in hardware and work out the bugs.

>>2932987
Not OP but the SNES has a clock speed of a few MHz (less than an arduino uno) and less than 1MB of RAM. Obviously running an emulator would require more processing power than having dedicated hardware but how did you arrive at the conclusion that nothing short of a microprocessor clocked at 1GHz at least and coupled with no less than a Gigabyte of ram will do?

This guy made an NES emulator using an ESP32 and an AVR chip to interface with the controls, none of which have specs even remotely close to the ones you listed: https://www.instructables.com/ESP32-Handheld-Game-Console/

>>2932987
Gameboy is like 8MHz + 16 KB RAM. ESP32 should be more than enough for that.

I think you should be focusing on building something that can run existing emulators rather than thinking about building a device that games could be made for.
If you got no games, you got no gaming console.

>>2933116
That would be more productive, but it's not something I would like to focus on to be honest. Porting and debugging whole ass emulator to an embedded environment is not really most interesting thing to do. Especially considering that I rather use Rust and would like to learn more about using it for embedded programming and Lua.

However there might be a nice way to do both actually. I might simply use PICO-8 API for making games, making this effectively a hardware to run PICO-8 games. This would be the best of two worlds, I would have an existing database of games, a software emulator and I would get to write some embedded Rust+Lua code. And PICO-8 API is tiny, it's only like 20-40 non-standard Lua functions.

Yey

Anyone has any idea why does the screen grid is offset? The absolute size is correct but top left corner of physical pixel grid seems to actually be at x=1, y=2. I have to be drawing to 1..160 x 2..129 inclusive in order for the image to properly align with the pixel grid. Might this be specific to this particular display model or maybe manufacturing problem?

>>2933176
>6 breadboards
>1.9" screen
Nice Gamebuoy