We’ve been big fans of the Arduboy since [Kevin Bates] showed off the first prototype back in 2014. It’s a fantastic platform for making and playing simple games, but there’s certainly room for improvement. One of the most obvious usability issues has always been that the hardware can only hold one game at a time. But thanks to the development of an official add-on, the Arduboy will soon have enough onboard storage to hold hundreds of games
The upgrade takes the form of a small flexible PCB that gets soldered to existing test points on the Arduboy. Equipped with a W25Q128 flash chip, the retrofit board provides an additional 16 MB of flash storage to the handheld’s ATmega32u4 microcontroller; enough to hold essentially every game and program ever written for the platform at once.
Of course, wiring an SPI flash chip to the handheld’s MCU is only half the battle. The system also needs to have its bootloader replaced with one that’s aware of this expanded storage. To that end, the upgrade board also contains an ATtiny85 that’s there to handle this process without the need for an external programmer. While this is a luxury the average Hackaday reader could probably do without, it’s a smart move for an upgrade intended for a wider audience.
The upgrade board is currently available for pre-order, but those who know their way around a soldering iron and a USBasp can upgrade their own hardware right now by following along with the technical discussion between [Kevin] and the community in the “Project Falcon” forum. In fact, the particularly astute reader may notice that this official upgrade has its roots in the community-developed Arduboy cartridge we covered last year.
The presence of the attiny seems at odds with the requirement of a soldering iron.
That TSSOP-8 package (or similar) in the picture certainly requires solder and some form of heating.
2 drips of zippo fluid and a match then.
Just need a wire to short that LiPo. The fire will do the rest.
OhBoy would be a better name :p
Hmm, how often can you savely flash an ATMega32u4?
Off you go to the datasheet!
http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/Atmel-7766-8-bit-AVR-ATmega16U4-32U4_Datasheet.pdf
512Bytes/1KB Internal EEPROM
– Write/Erase Cycles: 10,000 Flash/100,000 EEPROM
I wonder how this compares to the insertion cycles rating for a GameBoy’s cartage slot. I’d bet the Arduboy would outlast the cartage slot.
My guess would be that the cartridge slot can probably take the physical abuse of 10,000 cycles of remove/insert that’s numerically equivalent to Flash re-writes, but the EEPROM would probably outlast it.
They really ought to make a 32 bit ARM version of this console.
No point in binding the game developers in the chains of hardware constraints
I think the hardware constraints are the source of the charm of this little doohicky.
Unlike the AVR, RAM can be used for code in Arm. This means you don’t need to burn up the 10K erase/program endurance just to load in new game from serial FLASH.
Odroid-GO uses ESP32:
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/
Kind of silly not being able to flash a new boot loader from USB.