If you’re old enough to remember the 1990s, you might recall the sheer variety of portable gaming platforms that were around in those days. There was of course the ubiquitous hand-held Game Boy, and if you preferred something larger you could buy a Sega Game Gear or an Atari Lynx. But you could also go smaller with tiny LCD games like Nintendo’s Game and Watch series, with some versions literally the size of a wristwatch.
With all of these having gone the way of the dodo, we’re happy to see that [grossofabian] kept the tiny game world alive by designing the Game & Light: a tiny hand-held games platform with an OLED screen. It’s small enough to attach to your keychain and comes with an LED to act as a mini flashlight. But of course the main feature is the included video game: currently it comes with LEDboy Adventures, a side-scrolling platformer similar to Google’s T-Rex Game. A USB port can be used to recharge the device as well as to upload new games.
The Game & Light is housed in a 3D printed case and powered by a lithium-ion capacitor that can store enough charge for around 40 minutes of play time. The CPU is an ATtiny402 eight-pin microcontroller with 4 kB of flash, which is just enough to store the entire LEDboy game. Although currently only one game is available, the system is fully programmable and open sourced, so anyone who feels up to the task can help develop new games for the platform.
If you like keychain-sized games, you’re in luck: we recently featured the solar-powered but otherwise similar RunTinyRun. A bit longer ago, creative hackers even managed to squeeze entire Game Boys into tiny packages.
Continue reading “Game & Light Brings Video Games To Your Keychain”
