These days even a lowly microcontroller can easily trade blows with – or surpass – desktop systems of yesteryear, so it is little wonder that DIY handheld gaming systems based around an MCU are more capable than ever. A case in point is the GK handheld gaming system by [John Cronin], which uses an MCU from relatively new and very capable STM32H7S7 series, specifically the 225-pin STM32H7S7L8 in TFBGA package with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU.
Coupled with this MCU are 128 MB of XSPI (hexa-SPI) SDRAM, a 640×480 color touch screen, gyrometer, WiFi network support and the custom gkOS in the firmware for loading games off an internal SD card. A USB-C port is provided to both access said SD card’s contents and for recharging the internal Li-ion battery.
As can be seen in the demonstration video, it runs a wide variety of games, ranging from DOOM (of course), Quake, as well as Command and Conquer: Red Alert and emulators for many consoles, with the Mednafen project used to emulate Game Boy, Super Nintendo and other systems at 20+ FPS. Although there aren’t a lot of details on how optimized the current firmware is, it seems to be pretty capable already.
But does it run Doom (Eternal)? (gotta set a new bar for these high powered things…)
It might, but it probably takes forever.
What about license fee for copyrighted material?
Are you referring to the open source games that he’s running on the console?
And if you build you own go-kart, make sure you drive under the speed limit!
How are they running red alert? is it an x86 emulator, or did they recompile the recently-released red alert source code?
Not somewhere I expected to see my SDL2 CnC/RA port running!
Does this project use the neochrom gpu? I thought the gpu was closed source? Does anyone have any info on it?