The PICO-8 is what is known as a ‘fantasy console’– you can program it, and there are oodles of games, but it’s not actually the 8-bit console it pretends to be. It’s a virtual machine, one that can run on top of any modern OS. When [UncleStem] got into PICO-8, he decided that he liked the PICO-8’s portability, he wanted a different kind of portability– so he took the ‘fantasy’ out of ‘fantasy console’ with his GameBoy-esqe handheld build, the build/dev video of which is embedded below.

At its core, it’s a Raspberry Pi Zero2W. That’s rather overkill for an 8-bit virtual machine, but it’s what he had on hand, and it makes for an easy build. The real hero of the build is the 720 by 720 pixel IPS display that matches the PICO-8’s square aspect ratio and takes up most of the real estate on the handheld. Even better, it has HDMI in and sound support, so with some buttons and a battery the hardware is all there after [UncleStem] designs a handsome 3D printed case, and also has a go milling it out of aluminum before giving up and having a pro do it.

Since it’s so easy to do these days, everything lives on a custom PCB from his sponsor that gives the handheld good mechanical stability. He’s also using the full-colour silkscreen option to make a very pretty PCB. If that part of the project appeals, we’ve covered guides to PCB art before. He’s shared the PCB and everything else he can on a google drive, though note that the fantasy console itself is not open source, and would need purchased to finish the project.

Oddly enough, this is not the first handheld we’ve seen based on the PICO-8. That would be this project that uses a single-button camcorder form-factor. As unique as that is, this project has the benefit of working with the whole library of PICO-8 games.