Give In To Nostalgia With A Retro Game And Watch

Game And Watch

One of the earliest Nintendo products to gain popularity was the Game and Watch product line. Produced by Nintendo between 1980 and 1991, they are a source of nostalgia for many an 80s or 90s kid. These were those electronic handheld games that had pre-drawn monochrome images that would light up to make very basic animations. [Andrew] loved his old “Vermin” game as a kid, but eventually he sold it off. Wanting to re-live those childhood memories, he decided to build his own Game and Watch emulator.

The heart of [Andrew’s] build is a PIC18F4550 USB demo board he found on eBay. The board allows you to upload HEX files directly via USB using some simple front end software. [Andrew] wrote the code for his game in C using MPLAB. His device uses a Nokia 5110 LCD screen and is powered from a small lithium ion battery.

For the housing, [Andrew] started from another old handheld game that was about the right size. He gutted all of the old parts and stuck the new ones in their place. He also gave the housing a sort of brushed metal look using spray paint. The end result is a pretty good approximation of the original thing as evidenced by the video below.

15 thoughts on “Give In To Nostalgia With A Retro Game And Watch

    1. That’s brilliant! If Only I knew about Gamebuino before embarking on my DIY Game & Watch project (above). How long has it been about? Do you make any decent money selling it? How did you get it all produced, did you subcontract the case manufacturing

    1. Nintendo re-released the various Game & Watch games in a collection for original Game Boy, which you could play in both classic and “enhanced” mode (new sprites, etc). Could be a good source for official Chef images : )

    2. Sweet, My next Game & Watch project was going to be using a 320×240 colour screen and a PIC32. Nice to see I’m not the only one with these mad ideas.
      Andrew

  1. One of the earliest Nintendo products to gain popularity, in the sense that it came out in the first one hundred years of Nintendo’s existence, although after numerous other popular products, the very earliest of which came out almost a century before the Game & Watch.

    1. I had trouble figuring out what you meant with “first 100 years”, thinking you were talking about the 1800s or something. But you mean at the END of those years. Might’ve been phrased a little easier, like, “in 1981, after nearly a century in business…”. Since Nintendo’s ancient history vs the Game And Watch don’t have a lot to link them mentally.

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