A DIY 32-bit game console for the price of a latte | Hacker News Reader

A DIY 32-bit game console for the price of a latte

rossum.posterous.com

112 pointsm-photonic13 comments

Pretty neat. Here some URLs which weren't provided in the article.

[1] http://ics.nxp.com/lpcxpresso/ [2] http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?lang=en...

Looks like the LCPXpresso board costs around $30, the price of ten lattes.

The Uzebox impresses me, but this is even cooler. More power in a smaller form factor :)

Yeah, but the Uzebox has a kernel that lets you develop sprite/tile-based games without worrying about cycle-counting and whatnot. This doesn't (yet).

I want to develop games for this. How hard would it be for someone with no circuitry experience to build?

If you can get the parts and PCB, you have the logical methodical mind of a programmer, and you can learn to solder, you should be able to build it. SMT soldering is one of the harder sorts, but if you learned how to solder correctly you can do it.

Once you can solder, I'd put it at 'challenging but enjoyable, spend 2-7 late nights'

I don't think itd take anything like that long. It looks like there's 15 (smd) components, 11 jumper wires, a 6 pin header and 4 wires from the joystick - anybody who's ever successfully soldered smd components before could easily put this together in under half an hour.

Have a look around and see if you can find a local hackerspace, there's probably half a dozen people at my local one (free plug for http://robotsanddinosaurs.org ) who'd do this for you any Saturday afternoon...

> anybody who's ever successfully soldered smd components before could easily put this together in under half an hour.

Yeah, but the parent has a self-described 0 experience, and I assume can't solder either. So, 1 night to assemble, and 1-6 nights to debug.

Yeah, I guess that's true.

I still reckon the parent poster should seek out a hackerspace or similar, so he can spend those nights 1 through 6 debugging his game instead of the hardware...

Actually, you don't need no stinking SMT. The parts are way big enough to solder via the more traditional methods. And even better, you don't need SMT-style casings for the resistors, etc. their wired counterparts are readily available (albeit not as pretty).

Speaking of developing games for it, how does that work? I see the word 'flash' mentioned a few times, is the author talking about the same technology people make games on the Internet with?

No. You're thinking of Adobe/Macromedia flash. The word you're seeing relates to a type of memory (and more recently) a process of storing data in that memory.

You're going to need to know either C or the architecture assembly (and probably both to do much beyond "hello world"). If you're not a programmer (inferring from your comment), there are some arduino game kits which are much more friendly.

C and assembly should work pretty well. As an alternative you can also look into Forth, a cool language that's easy to get running on the bare metal, and spans the levels from assembly to C and above.

A Forth machine is almost as amazing as a Lisp machine, and the language share some similarity in spirit, also (or maybe because) they are almost their exact opposites in almost all technical aspects.

(See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language) for an overview.

"Forth is currently used in boot loaders such as Open Firmware, space applications, and other embedded systems.")

Reply on news.ycombinator.com