Running vintage console emulators on a Raspberry Pi seems to be the thing all the cool kids are doing. The coolest RetroPie builds take a vintage console – usually of the Nintendo genus – stuff a Raspi in there somehow, and Bob’s your uncle. [Phil Herlihy] over at Adafruit is throwing his hat into the ring with a similar build. For this one, though, he’s using Sega’s oft-maligned Game Gear. He might actually get more than a few hours out of the battery with this one, and the battery is rechargeable, too. You can’t beat that.
The build begins with tearing down an old Game Gear, chopping up the PCB to save the button contact, and starting to fit all the components in there. The display is completely replaced with a 3.5″ composite display, a bit larger than the 3.2″ display found in a stock Game Gear. That’s not a problem, there’s a surprising amount of space behind the bezel, and if you’re good enough with an xacto blade and a file, it will look stock.
The rest of the components include an amplifier board, battery charge regulator, a 2500mAh LiPo, and a Teensy to read the buttons. There are a few modifications required for the Pi, but the finished device presents a USB port to the outside world; keep a keyboard by your side, and this is a portable Pi in every respect.
two buttons? great for nes, not much more.
There’s some cap touch pads in there.
Sonic the hedgehog 1 2 and 3 on genesis used only one button.
heh thought about doing exactly this but changed my mind
:/ mine’s in a state of perpetual un-done-ness
I really don’t like these mods of vintage equipment.
Why not design and make your own case? You could use the original for a mold. Cutting up the board just for the switches is a waste.
BTW, shouldn’t it be “Retropi” instead of “Retropie”?
No, they actually do call it the RetroPie.
I think the suggestion is that it OUGHT to be “Retropi”, not that it IS.
hmm a lot of the “broken” gamegears just need to be recapped…yeah they have a shitty screen but still
Throw in RGB mod and a new LCD and you can have great looking GG games.
This is better: http://www.mediavida.com/foro/hard-soft/worklog-consola-portatil-aspecto-retro-516647
Is the Game Gear really a cool thing? I know lots of people who had it and enjoyed it, and while there’s a certain nostalgia factor but nobody seems to think it was actually a good system in hindsight. It was huge, gobbled batteries, had a crappy screen, and not very many good games.
I knew this would work! I’d been waiting for this, thank you. I had grown tired of the GameboyPI hack jobs. This is really nice!