The rise of inexpensive yet relatively powerful electronics has enabled a huge array of computing options that would have been unheard of even two decades ago. A handheld gaming PC with hours of battery life, for example, would have been impossible or extremely expensive until recently. But this revolution has also enabled a swath of inexpensive but low-quality knockoff consoles, often running unlicensed games, that might not even reach the low bar of quality set by their sellers. [Jorisclayton] was able to modify one of these to live up to its original promises.
This Ultimate Brick Game, as it is called, originally didn’t even boast the number of games, unlicensed or otherwise, that it claimed to. [Jorisclayton] removed almost all of the internals from this small handheld to help it live up to this original claim. It boasts a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W now as well as a TFT screen and has a number of other improvements including Bluetooth support for external controllers and upgraded audio. A second console was used for donor parts, and some case mods were made as well to accommodate a few extra buttons missing on the original console.
Right now the project is in a prototype phase, as [Jorisclayton] is hoping to use the donor case to build a more refined version of this handheld console in the future. Until then, this first edition upgrade of the original console can run RetroPie, which means it can run most games up through the Nintendo 64 era. RetroPie enables a ton of emulation for old video games including arcade games of the past. This small arcade cabinet uses that software to bring back a bit of nostalgia for the arcade era.
“Ultimate Brick Game” strikes me as a particularly inauspicious name for an electronic device of any kind…
Not to be confused with “Ultimate Bricked Game”
Don’t be confused with “Ultimate Bricked Game”
Often referred to as 999in1 and numerous numeral variations. Anyone have a good link about the rom or firmware on the cheap game electronics?
Nope. But I still have one exactly like this one somewhere, maybe I can dump it. :)
Might as well post these links of somebody who decapped the chips, reverse engineered the rom content, determined which CPU was used and wrote emulators for it and similar machines:
https://habr.com/ru/articles/773040/
https://github.com/azya52/brickemupy
There’s also something going on in the Mame project, afaif.
I was a bit disappointed by this one. It sounds like they just used the case and dumped everything else. I was really hoping this was going to be about altering the firmware and expanding the capabilities. That would be a cool hack!
I actually bought a 30$ gaming handheld (known as R36S, with 1GB of RAM) which runs Linux and retoarch
You can connect it to a USB keyboard and press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to access the tty0 terminal
Sad that it doesn’t have a wifi chipset or it would be a great machine.
The games themselves are just pirated games for a lot of consoles. PS1, GBA, NDS, GBC. The performance is great for most
I wrote a blog post about how to program the R36S. It is really a decent Linux box, and wifi may be accessed with a wifi dongle. See: https://github.com/dov/r36s-programming