Published in Hardware

Story Reference Device

Before going digital, you might scribbling down some ideas in a sketchbook.

By Kion

Concept device

I think handhelds can roughly be broken down into five generations

  • Gen 1: Gameboy, Gameboy Pocket
  • Gen 2: Gameboy Color
  • Gen 3: Gameboy Advance / PSP
  • Gen 4: 3DS / PS Vita
  • Gen 5: Switch

The target here is something like Gen 3. We want a D-pad, start, select, left and right triggers and four face buttons. For screen resolution, we want 640x480 pixels and something around the 3.5 - 4.5 inch range. We can add a few touches like volume, brightness and a homebutton as well a USB-C charging.

Development Hardware

For a core reference device, we pretty much want a Pi Zero with an F310 controller, and a small dispplay running retro pi.

What Environment to Build from?

We have a few options:

  • Ubuntu
  • Elementary OS
  • Raspberry Pi OS
  • Windows? šŸ¤®

I think the assertion we want to make here is gcc, visual studio code and some kind of make script. We can probably build and develop with Ubuntu or Elementary before the tutorials. But for the tutorials, we should probably record everything on a raspberry pi.

What devices to deploy to?

We would also want to check that it works on these devices. Criteria is the correct number of buttons, runs linux, correct display and has wifi.

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Why do we use it?

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Where can I get some?

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