[Jason Carlson]’s favorite game as kid was 1983’s Treasure of Tarmin by Intellivision, a maze game that eventually came to be called Minotaur. As an adult there was only one thing he could do: remake it on a beautiful Arduino-based handheld.
[Jason] built the handheld out of a small-footprint Arduino Mega clone, a 1.8” LCD from Adafruit, a 5 V booster, a 1” speaker and vibe motor for haptic feedback. There are some nice touches, like the joystick with a custom Sugru top and a surprisingly elegant 2 x AA battery holder — harvested from a Yamaha guitar.
The maze maps are all the same as the original game, which [Jason] found online, but he stored the maps as bytes in an array to speed up the game—there was a flicker in the refresh already. However he added a progress map so players could see every area that was explored. In addition to Minotaur [Jason] also added remakes of Tetris, Simon and Snake, simpler games he wrote to test out the hardware.
We’ve published a bunch of handheld gaming projects over the years, including putting a Pi Zero in a GameBoy, building a throwback handheld, and playing Ocarina of Time on a N64 handheld.
Yeah, no laser burnt edges and crenelations. A plywood edge ain’t great but not bad at all.
No comments after a couple days. The idea of a dedicated portable single-game console is somewhat unique. I would personally have gone with a larger screen though : )
Nice wood-finished case and neat implementation of the Minotaur game though!
where did he manage to find the mazes for this game, I know there is only a hand full of 5×5 map sections that are randomly placed together to make the maze but I have looked and looked and have still not found any where that has them.
I found the information for the maps on this post at AtariAge:
http://atariage.com/forums/topic/223326-ad-d-treasure-of-tarmin-gameplay/page-2
The thread includes a nice 3D SkechUp and a detailed description of how they are generated and laid out.