Odroid-Go Review: An Affordable DIY Portable Game Console | Hacker News Reader

Odroid-Go Review: An Affordable DIY Portable Game Console

electromaker.io

124 pointsrbanffy32 comments

You should also check out the PSPI 1000 v4 which is a similar project built into a PSP 1000 case. It's had a few revisions and the work that's been put into it is pretty amazing.

https://othermod.com/pspi-1000-version-4/

Of similar ilk and made by the community super star sprite_tm: https://pocketsprite.com

Great to see Jeroen is still at it. I used to live across the street from him and it was always fascinating to see what he was up to. Hanging out at his place was the closest thing to what I imagine Silicon Valley must have been like during the heydays of hardware hacking. Probably why he moved to Shenzhen. His writeups at https://spritesmods.com are also good reads. I see he has also done a miniature Mac Plus: http://spritesmods.com/?art=minimacplus

He is actually working for Espressif now I believe, due to his work on the ESP8266 framework!

Wow, that's amazingly small. Perfect for my child who's obsessed with miniature things (e.g. the Japanese miniature cooking videos)

> PocketSprite has 16 MiB of flash,

Is this from 2002? Why does it have such a laughably small storage size in 2018? The ESP32 should be able to address more than that, and it could be connected over SPI.. espressif even gives an example: https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf/tree/master/examples/st...

Because real content lives on the microSD card?

Pocket and sprite (singular) indeed... wow that is small.

So Odroid came out with their own GameBoy zero eh?

Not bad for <$50 considering I paid a bucketload to pre-order the circuit sword CM3 GBZ board just to get high score in Blade Buster on the road.

Then once I got it I had to re-design all the 3D printed parts since they didn’t meet my standards: https://github.com/eltoozero/lol-gbz_3dparts

Is there a commercial version of this that doesn't require self-assembly? I found a few hacky Chinese ones on Amazon but I'm curious if there are any higher quality multi-platform ROM portable devices available.

Your best bet is a bespoke creation using the circuit sword, it’s quite a fine product.

If you’re interested, the pre-order for this year has already closed but I secured a large order to fulfill custom orders for the holidays.

lee@braains.net

> but I secured a large order to fulfill custom orders for the holidays.

You mean order of Circuit Swords? I wasn't familiar with this board until I googled it just now.

What about cases with buttons and screens?

I'd love to be able to pay someone for one of these 'Bespoke' pre-assembled. Like an Etsy for electronics hackers.

Yes, I pre-ordered a large batch of circuit swords for supplying as fully assembled units, or single-sourced kits with all electronics and 3D printed components ready to assemble.

It’s a shame they are only available twice a year, but I’m putting some money down to fill in the gap; hopefully I don’t regret my investment, it’s a very cool project.

Actually I forgot about the gp2x and the newer wiz one, never used it but looks snazzy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP2X_Wiz

I ordered one of these, as a result of reading this post. It took me a while to get code uploaded, as the documentation was missing a couple of steps.

That said it is a cute device which arrived in Finland in less than a week, and I've been reliving my childhood by playing Tetris and Super Mario Bros #3 for the past few hours.

I made some notes here to fill in the missing steps for uploading code via the Arduino-studio:

https://blog.steve.fi/odroid_go_initial_impressions.html

The buy link https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_cod...

And for none gaming check out the hd1 and hd2 line from the odroid maker. Designed just for hard drives. Best home cloud / rsync hardware you can get for $45 bucks

I think you meant hc1[1] and hc2[2]..

[1] https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_cod...

[2] https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_cod...

I ordered three of these last week to build with my nephew and niece. Shipping was quick to Canada and done with DHL. Looking forward to putting these together and hoping they might spark a bit of interest in programming or hardware in the kids.

Does anyone have any links to programming tutorials of videos that kids might like about this platform?

Very cool. I had no idea there was a handheld platform so easy to cobble together. I looked at some units from banggood and stuff, but couldn't find a way to upload ROMs to them.

I'd really only use this for when I'm flying for business trips, so the headphone jack is sorta a necessity for me. I hope that gets added soon.

I'd rather buy this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLS5WzyEINA

Every link on that page just took me back to their same website. Is this some kind of SEO antipattern? It makes it really difficult tracking down the actual parts.

Pretty sweet. I wish this and the other 10 DIY/programmable mobile consoles would make it into mass market (toy?) stores. For years, this market has only been making circles in a tiny part of the geekosphere It’d be great to get it in the hands of everyone and then see what happens. Im sure you’ll get a surge of indie developers making and sharing games and kids in school showing off their latest creations.

That is my ongoing issue with these "RPi" killers, they simply do not make it out to the mass market.

All of them seems to involve ordering directly from manufacturer.

Part of it I imagine is these hacker game systems are designed and marketed towards other gamer hackers and require, or at least the apparent need for,a more technical skill set than a regular game system.

However I can imagine something like Lego and Ninteno making a package that is designed for children to learn from.

Nintendo wants their customers to purchase games, because that's what drives their revenue. While the act of "making" is integral to Lego customers, the company hopes to sell customers more and more kits/bricks.

A self-contained user-programmable video game device probably needs more support and offers less recurring revenue opportunity than mass market game consumption platforms.

It's a terrible thing for a owners of a business to turn a reliable consumer of its products into a happy frugal maker.

I could have sworn that Nintendo is the only company of the 3 major console brands that do not sell the console at a loss.

I think they are, but I imagine the profit from their first party game IP and the licensing fees from other game publishers probably dwarfs that profit.

So, they shouldn't be in dire financial straits if they don't sell games, but it sure isn't the winning strategy.

I duno about the games focus. Nintendo loves selling the consoles too, over and over again if at all possible.

The combination of portability (at least the handheld devices) and the fact that many of the devices are owned by kids increases the chance that a device will be lost or broken, requiring replacement. Just like cell phones.

Nonetheless, if the expected profit from each game-maker device is less than the profit from each play-only device, why would a manufacturer of the latter make any of the former?

It was other times, but I still remember the first Spectrum kits being sold as DIY, so there is that nostalgia part as well.

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