Game Boy? NES? Why Not Both!

June 19, 2025 by Jenny List 4 Comments

If you’re a retro Nintendo fan you can of course carry a NES and a Game Boy around with you, but the former isn’t very portable. Never fear though, because here’s [Chad Burrow], who’s created a neat handheld console that emulates both.

It’s called the Acolyte Handheld, and it sports the slightly unusual choice for these parts of a PIC32 as its main processor. Unexpectedly it can use Sega Genesis controllers, but it has the usual buttons on board for portable use. It can drive either its own LCD or an external VGA monitor, and in a particularly nice touch, it switches between the two seamlessly. The NES emulator is his own work, while Game Boy support comes courtesy of Peanut-GB.

We like the design of the case, and particularly that of the buttons. Could it have been made smaller by forgoing some of the through-hole parts in favour of SMD ones? Quite likely, but though it’s chunky it’s certainly not outsized.

Portable Nintendo-inspired hardware is popular around here, as you can see with this previous handheld NES

Open A Portal To An NES Emulator

June 13, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

The Portal games were revolutionary not only for their puzzle-based, narrative-driven gameplay, but also for their unique physics engine, which let players open portals anywhere and conserve momentum and direction through them. They’re widely regarded as some of the best video games ever made, but even beyond that they have some extra features that aren’t talked about as much. Namely, there are a number of level editors and mods that allow the in-game components to be used to build things like logic gates and computers, and this project goes even further by building a working NES emulator, all within Portal 2.

The main limitation here is that Portal 2 can only support a certain number of in-game objects without crashing, far lower than what would be needed to directly emulate NES hardware. The creator of the project, [PortalRunner], instead turned to Squirrel, the Portal 2 scripting language, and set about porting an existing NES emulator called smolnes to this scripting language. This is easier said than done, as everything in the code needs to be converted eight bits and then all of the pointers in smolnes need to be converted to use arrays, since Squirrel doesn’t support pointers at all. As can be easily imagined, this led to a number of bugs that needed to be sorted out before the game would run at all.

For those interested in code golfing, porting, or cross-compatibility, this project is a master class not only in the intricacies of the Portal 2 scripting language but in the way the NES behaves as well, not to mention the coding skill needed to recognize unique behaviors of the C language and the Squirrel scripting language. But eventually [PortalRunner] is able to get Super Mario Bros. running in Portal 2, albeit with low resolution and frame rate. Since we heard you like games within games, someone else put DOOM inside DOOM so you can DOOM while you DOOM.

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Black and white photo of Evertop computer on desk

The Evertop: A Low-Power, Off-Grid Solar Gem

April 23, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 32 Comments

When was the last time you saw a computer actually outlast your weekend trip – and then some? Enter the Evertop, a portable IBM XT emulator powered by an ESP32 that doesn’t just flirt with low power; it basically lives off the grid. Designed by [ericjenott], hacker with a love for old-school computing and survivalist flair, this machine emulates 1980s PCs, runs DOS, Windows 3.0, and even MINIX, and stays powered for hundreds of hours. It has a built-in solar panel and 20,000mAh of battery, basically making it an old-school dream in a new-school shell.

What makes this build truly outstanding – besides the specs – is how it survives with no access to external power. It sports a 5.83-inch e-ink display that consumes zilch when static, hardware switches to cut off unused peripherals (because why waste power on a serial port you’re not using?), and a solar panel that pulls 700mA in full sun. And you guessed it – yes, it can hibernate to disk and resume where you left off. The Evertop is a tribute to 1980s computing, and a serious tool to gain some traction at remote hacker camps.

For the full breakdown, the original post has everything from firmware details to hibernation circuitry. Whether you’re a retro purist or an off-grid prepper, the Evertop deserves a place on your bench. Check out [ericjenott]’s project on Github here.

Give Your Animal Crossing Villagers The Gift Of Linux

February 18, 2025 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

If you’ve played any of the versions of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing over the years, you’ll know that eventually you get to the point where you’ve maxed out your virtual house and filled it with all the furniture you could possibly want — which is arguably as close to “winning” the game as you can get.

But now thanks to the work of [decrazyo] there’s a piece of furniture that you can add to your Animal Crossing house that will never get old: an x86 emulator that boots Linux. As explained in the video below, this trick leverages the fact that Nintendo had already built a highly accurate Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator into Animal Crossing on the GameCube, which could be used to run a handful of classic games from within the player’s virtual living room. But it turns out that you can get that emulator to load a user-provided ROM from the GameCube’s memory card, which opens the doors to all sorts of mischief.

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Game Bub Plays ROMs And Cartridges

February 15, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

With today’s technology, emulating video game consoles from the 90s or before is trivial. A Raspberry Pi and a controller of some sort is perhaps the easiest and simplest way to go to get this job done, but to really impress the masses some extra effort is required. This handheld from [Eli] called the Game Bub not only nails the appearance and feel of the first three generations of Nintendo handhelds but, thanks to its FPGA, can play not only ROMs but the original game cartridges as well.

As [Eli] notes, the FPGA is not strictly necessary for emulation, but does seem to be better at interfacing with physical hardware like controllers and game cartridges. For this task an Xilinx XC7A100T with integrated memory was chosen, with a custom PCB supporting the built-in controller, speaker, a rechargeable lithium battery, and a 480×320 display (that had to be rotated out of portrait mode). An SD Card reader is included for any ROM files, and there’s also a ESP32-S3 included to give the handheld WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, with future plans to support the communications protocol used by the Game Boy Advance Wireless Adapter.

There are a few other features with the Game Bub as well, including the ability to use an authentic link cable to communicate with the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and a Switch-like dock that allows the Game Bub to be connected to an external monitor. It’s also open source, which makes it an even more impressive build. Presumably it doesn’t include the native ability to dump cartridges to ROM files but you don’t need much more than a link cable to do that if you need to build your ROM library.

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Homebrew Retro Console Runs On PIC32

January 13, 2025 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

[Chad Burrow] decided to take on a noble task—building a “retro” style computer and video game console. Only, this one is built using somewhat modern hardware—relying on the grunt of the PIC32MZ2048EFH144 to get the job done. Meet the Acolyte Hand PIC’d 32.

It’s name might be a mouthful, but that chip can pull off some great feats! With a clock speed of 200 MHz, it’s not short on processing power, though RAM and flash storage are somewhat limited at just 512 KB and 2MB respectively. [Chad] was able to leverage those constraints to get a VGA output working at a resolutions up to 800 x 600, with up to 65,000 colors—though 256 colors is more practical due to memory concerns. The Acolyte Hand also rocks two 8-bit audio channels. It has a pair of Genesis-compatible controller ports as well as PS/2 and USB for keyboards and mice, along with more modern Xbox 360 controllers.

[Chad] cooked up some software to put it through its paces, too. It’s got a Tetris clone on board, and can also run Game Boy games at full speed via the Peanut-GB emulator. That provides for a pretty rich game library, though [Chad] notes he plans to develop more native video games for his system to demo at his local college. Design files are on Github for the curious.

This project is a great example of just how powerful modern microcontrollers have become. Once upon a time, just driving a simple black-and-white graphical LCD might have taken some real effort, but today, there are pixels and clock cycles to spare in projects like these. Truly a wonderous world we live in!

ESP32 Powers Single-PCB ZX Spectrum Emulator

June 16, 2024 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

When word first got out that the Chinese board houses were experimenting with full color silkscreens, many in our community thought it would be a boon for PCB art. Others believed it would be akin to cheating by removing the inherent limitations of the medium. That’s not a debate that will be solved today, but here we have an example of a project that’s not only making practical application of the technology, but one that arguably couldn’t exist in its current form without it: a single-PCB ZX Spectrum emulator developed by [atomic14].

There basics here are, well, they’re pretty basic. You’ve got an ESP32-S3, a TFT display, a micro SD slot, and the handful of passives necessary to tie them all together. What makes this project stand out is the keyboard, which has been integrated directly into the PCB thanks to the fourteen pins on the ESP32-S3 that can be used as touch sensor input channels. There are issues with detecting simultaneous keypresses, but overall it seems to work pretty well.

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