Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time

Thanks a lot :)

It really is super satisfying to get this far, I still turn it on sometimes just to check if it really works.

And I also had zero experience with electronics (and I still don't know as much as I should...), so yeah I think you could piece together something like this. :)

Agreed, this is dank. The successful wiring alone is noteworthy.

There is something weirdly satisfying about doing something purely for the sake of doing it. So many people start projects hoping they can turn it into a business or gain stars in Github - you see less and less people hacking stuff together just for personal enjoyment.

I think we need more of that too. Everyone seems to be on a quest for perfection: perfect code, 3D printed casing, everything intellectualised to the nth degree. There's a lot to be said for the "rough and ready" approach of experimentation. However to do that you really need to be on a pursuit for personal gratification because the internet is a harsh bitch for pointing out ones mistakes.

I totally agree. The reason I stuck to DIP ICs was because I could fit them into breadboards and I thought that was easier than any alternative. I was incredibly lucky on how all the breadboards were functional. And there were a few times where I would accidentally disconnect a wire and spend the next 2 hours trying to figure out what was wrong. All this without having a logic analyser and not even an oscilloscope until much later in the build (they are not that cheap). And yes the project sure is complex, too complex, but I guess I was lucky, and I'm glad it's working :).

When I was a lad, wirewrap was the thing. You can prototype quickly, and make changes easily too.

(It seems like it's still a thing in fact http://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/wire_wrap_is_alive...)

I would argue that with the extremely low cost of PCB manufacturing (and... if you have access to it... assembly) it's easier now to just lay out a PCB and get it made. The trick is to build up a library of circuit "modules" (like... power supply section, battery charging, video output, etc) that get copy-pasted together. Of course there's the delay in waiting for the PCBs, which could be frustrating for a hobby project (I was lucky enough to live in SZ for a while where getting PCBs back 2 days after ordering is standard). But parallelising projects can be an effective way of dealing with that, and the variety on working on different things (and the joy of getting a PCB in the mail) can help to mitigate that.

Copper tape on cardboard.

Cardboard is a fantastic material. You can draw the schematic on, and then run copper tape along the schematic. It's easy to annotate, since you just need to use a pen. It's able to handle much more current than a breadboard, since the copper tape has a lot more metal than thin wires. You can solder directly to it, and with tape (or some other insulating material) you can cross wires without having them short.

You can also work with SMT ICs. Using a pair of scissors, you can make your own pads and solder to them. I connected an SO8 to read off the SPI data using copper tape. I built an amplifier using a spare Novena amplifier IC on cardboard with copper tape. And I have a level shifter done on cardboard with copper tape.

Bunnie has a good article on it here, including an example power regulator that's handling 2A on cardboard: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5259

I would definitely buy one. And also buy the companion DIY kit.

Yeah, absolutely. Especially coming from a modern software developers POV. I always think it would be fun to get into electronics, but it just seems so much to take in.

Thanks :)

I've kept this project to myself and would only describe it occasionally to some coworkers and friends. I never thought that many people would find it cool. And always thought that people with more knowledge than me would find a lot of flaws. So it's really awesome to read yours and all the other comments. :)

I don't think I could write a book, but I have though in writing other posts, giving more detail in certain aspects of the console. There's really a lot I could say about it and I only realised how much there was to say when I started writing this.

I can highly recommend nand2tetris. It doesn't go as far as this post but it covers a lot and is a ton of fun to work through.

Check out the XGameStation that Andre Lamothe created about 15 years ago. There’s an eBook that goes along with it.

He wrote a handful of game programming books in the 90’s as well.

It is sad that TAB books is no longer a thing, they totally would have published the "BUILD YOUR OWN VIDEO GAME" book. That said, I bet that you could get NoStarch Press to publish it.

Hmm. What do people reckon the price point and market is like for this? Are people still willing to pay $30 for a book, or is it more of a $3 ebook?

Thank you :)

I would love to learn more and be able to work with faster circuits like you. Yes it's way easier to work with "slow" digital circuits I had very little issues using breadboards and really long wires, that probably look cringy to you and others.

No pesky compliance issues eating into your precious timing margins...

Thank you :)

I am considering doing a series of blog posts, I don't know how often I could write them or if I could keep them going, but I will try. I'm not big in social media and I have never written any posts or anything like before this one, which is weird, I'll admit it, so all this is kind of new, but I think I'll give it go.

Old systems used line-buffers like the Neo Geo or no buffers like the NES, for example. So yeah, going with a frame-buffered approach was definitely easier, but this was not the only reason I chose this way. I had a lot of restrictions, I was learning a lot of stuff, I didn't know how to work with FPGAs and I stuck with DIP package ICs that I could put on breadboards and experiment. And that's why I picked the AVR microcontrollers, which are awesome but have their disavantages. They have good performance (20Mhz), but not many pins and I had to bit-bang things like external RAM access (actually the PPU accesses 3 RAMs with only 32 IO pins available), which meant that it takes "some time" to access external memory. That's why I chose 2 microcontrollers for video instead of just one, one of them could take "all the time in the world" (one frame) to fetch information and write a frame to the frame buffer while the other would generate the video signal and dump the a frame to the TV. Connecting the two, I felt a double buffer was better.

I definitely would have preferred doing a more "traditional" non-buffered render system, but this was the solution I found with what I had to work with.

I hope serves as a good explanation and maybe I'll get to explain these details better in another post :).

Thanks :) (I don't mind people saying it over and over again, believe me :P)

I actually started building a much smaller video game console with a cheap Cyclone II FPGA board (a friend of mine wanted one and I tried to figure it out how I could make something smaller and cheaper but still retro and cool) and I'm using VHDL, it's not exactly easy to learn but it's pretty cool, and I find it really hard to find good resources to learn from.

If I was to start all over again, I would use an FPGA for the graphics, for sure, at the time I just didn't know how.

And thanks again for the comment :)

It's almost like Portuguese people are not a uniform block, right?

Thank you, if it's something you like, you should try a hardware project, for sure :)

And yes I am Portuguese, born and raised and I do know what you mean, there are mistakes that are somewhat common for Portuguese speaking English and I do make an effort not to make the same mistakes. However I know my English is far form perfect and it's always easier when it's in written form. I think that the fact that I've always spent too much time watching american/british movies and TV shows made me pay more attention to how English should be spoken :).

But anyway, thank you for saying I speak perfect English, it's actually a great compliment. :)

I agree (and thanks for calling me a smart individual :) )

Nowadays is so much easier to get information on how to build something apparently very complex. You don't need to go to a library or seek out and go talk to experts, you actually have access to all that through the internet in forums, articles, posts and videos.

Also it's easy nowadays to order all the things you need for a project online.

Thanks :)

Interestingly enough, looking at the HW, there is not much there that wouldn't have been feasible for hobbyist a decade ago. But of course the community and information has absolutely exploded during that period

Interesting perspective. I wonder what kinds of projects a motivated individual would be able to tackle say, 20-30 years from now.

Thank you so much :)

I'm actually a bit overwhelmed with all the comments and I'm trying to answer at least a few of them.

Just wanted to say that, even without knowing you, I think you could absolutely be a tinkerer or creator, just choose something you would like to build, start small and go from there. :)

+1 from me. I am a lot interested in getting into hands on electronics and most of the times I end up falling a little too short as there is no support around where I live and I never really got a start. Would definitely love some inputs from people who are good at this.

Thanks :)

Well nowadays there's a lot of material online, I did find a book interesting, though: "Make: Electronics", it teaches the basics in a very nice way.

Aside from that the key, I guess, is to start small and incrementally go for more and more complex stuff going towards things you like (video games, robotics, etc). If you consistently achieve small victories I think it's enough to stay motivated. Everytime I managed to overcome something, I took it as a victory (generating the video signal, getting a program to run on the CPU, etc) and this helped me get to the next problem to solve.

I started with discrete logic and an Arduino, went on to programming microncontrollers similar to the one on the Arduino and moved from there to CPUs, RAMs, FPGAs, etc.

Also Youtube channels like EEVblog and GreatScott! are great learning resources.

There's the xgamestation boards that you put together yourself, that give you a helping hand in the initial steps of building your own retro console: http://www.ic0nstrux.com/products/gaming-systems/game-consol...

People invariable ask a form of this question every time an impressive project like this is posted.

For what its worth(1), I think that "learn a bunch of stuff -> go build something cool on the first try" isn't quite the right approach. I think you have to set for yourself a series of tasks and then fight like hell to figure out how to accomplish them. Start with a single blinking led. Just google "how to blink an led" and try to do it a few different ways.

In short the only "material" you might use to get started is google, by typing in "how do I..." while chasing modest goals that look like they might be in roughly the right direction. If there is a magic book out there that will "teach you electronics", I haven't found it yet. It sounds a lot like the sort of book that might "teach you astronauting".

"Electronics" is broad enough that it might be more like learning a language than learning a skill.

(1)My own meandering opinion

Start with an Arduino. Really simple circuits and you get to learn on a microcontroller. It's fun too. For instance learn how to turn on and off an LED then go from there

https://store.arduino.cc/usa/arduino/most-popular

It's dense but the Art of Electronics is the one book I keep coming back too. Better as a reference than a tutorial, once you've played around with an Arduino or the like I found it great to opening up the "what next?" part of EE.

I’m no expert whatsoever, but I’d recommend getting an Arduino (the cheap knockoffs aren’t horrible, but if you get one, be sure to donate a couple of dollars to the legit Arduino people), a couple of big breadboards, a jumper wiring kit (preferably with all of the different inch fractions so your wiring stays neat), and some basic components (resistors, capacitors, LEDs, buttons, simple ICs, etc).

Once you have all that, get the Arduino do turn on an LED when you press a button on the breadboard. Incorporate some kind of sensor, if you want. After that experience, you should be ready to tackle a bigger project. Now that you have a test bed, you can incrementally build circuits from books and the Internet and actually understand what’s going on.

The first half of nand2tetris[1] (projects 1-6), which corresponds to their first Coursera course[2] is a great introduction to the digital side of electronics. The second half is more general purpose computer and OS specific but probably still pretty useful. I've only finished up to chapter 5 as of right now, so I can't say anything definite.

[1] https://www.nand2tetris.org/

[2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer

I quite enjoyed Ben Eater's playlist on building a breadboard computer, made a lot of electronic concepts click for me.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2...

Start small. Here's a shift register: http://www.ti.com/product/SN74LV8153

It turns serial signal into parallel output.

They are often found in kits like this: https://www.amazon.com/Smraza-Breadboard-Resistors-Mega2560-... (research a better one than this)

Get a Raspberry Pi (Any controller really, get what you what)

Build something useless like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgnopk1qmkk

There are lots of learning kits available on Amazon. That's how I "taught myself" hobby electronics. I don't know much, but this stuff is magic! So it's impressive to most just to implement a simple shift register! Blinkenlights for the win!

You see this with grown up devs too. Many of them have only ever learnt to code with a full suite of build tools such as web pack, grunt and npm. They seem lost without these things and only a few really know what's going on under the hood. The best devs I've worked with are feel comfortable getting things done even when those tools are taken away.

In case you don't know about it, see also: https://hackaday.com/

Thanks for the comment :)

I am proud and honestly reading all these comments of people like you saying awesome stuff and also saying this inspires them makes me even prouder :)

I agree! I was just watching one of his videos the other day on creating a brand new 8-bit computer and I think he would be super interested in your work.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uT9cgJorJPWu7ITLGo9Ww

Yeah I did put more memory than the old school consoles had, absolutely, however the RAM in those days was only used for data mostly because they also had the cartridge ROM (or ROMs) to store the code. In my case I need to load the code to RAM, so I would always need a larger RAM.

But yeah, they also had less colors to work with and palettes (which were costier to implement in a software renderer). And this CPU is also faster than of those consoles. I did give myself a more confortable system in terms of RAM and computational power.

But my aim was for a machine that would sit somewhere between the 3rd and 4th generation.

The double buffering I understand as well, if I was working with an FPGA I would not have gone with frame buffers, for sure, but that was the solution I found at the time using the components I was using and it worked.

The attention this has gotten, especially here in HN is still a bit unbelievable to me (and amazing of course). I don't want people to think this is an optimal console design or anything. This is by no means a perfect project or "the way to go" in terms of homebrew video game consoles, it's just the way I found to do one while learning electronics along the way.

And thanks :)

Yeah, his project was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this.

I thought about it, I really did, however, I really felt I didn't need the extra RAM, especially for the kinds of programs and games I was aiming for.

And in this case "a handful of 74244" is a lot more complexity and it got a to a point where I really wanted to minimize the amount of ICs I used.

Also I was felt bank switching added complexity when developing for it. This way I can write a C program have it access data and I don't have to worry about the code being split in more than one bank or having the data be in a different bank than the code, etc.

It's a nice catch though, thanks for the comment.

First of all thanks :) And if you do find some time that project seems really cool, I never really got to work with the STM32 micros, but they are really powerful and cool.

Answering your question, well, even thought this is an electronics engineering project, I don't feel qualified to work with electronics professionally, for example, there's a lot of knowledge I lack. I do work as a software engineer and I have done a couple of interviews myself to hire people and I do believe this helps when applying to a job, I'm not saying it completely replaces your qualifications but it might at least give you an edge. I'm seeing this as someone who would want to hire someone skillful. A technical project certainly is on the very least a nice thing to have in a CV. Of course this is just my opinion. And if you are feeling like applying for a job based on your projects, just give it a go.

One advice I can give is: if you do have projects of your own, big or small, don't do it like me and keep them to yourself for years :P. I really had no idea so many people would appreciate my pet project.

Because the journey is more important than the destination.

The same reason people run a marathon instead of just driving the route.

(I'm actually secretly a horrible person :P)

Thanks for the comment :)

Like I wrote in another comment. There's a great book called "Make: Electronics". And you can get started with an Arduino kit, it comes with a book and several components. After this when you feel comfortable, you can move one to more advanced stuff, depending on what you're interested in.

There are plenty of videos online for almost any topic in electronics, and projects online using all kinds of components and for all kinds of purposes.

Check out EEVblog, the forums are good, and there are some videos for beginners and also the Youtube channel GreatScott!.

And thanks :)

Wozniak is a legend and this no where near the quality of his work. The way he designed the Apple II was just amazing.

Thanks for the comment :)

Thanks :)

And yeah you're right...my bad...

(EDIT) It should be a bit better now, thanks for the warning

Like I've said in a few other comments (I've been trying to answer some of the comments, everyone has been really nice and really interested), one book that got me started was "Make: Electronics", I believe there's a second one now, I really like how the book explains the very basics in a pratical way. Other than that there's a lot of info online nowadays. EEVblog aside from the forums has a nice youtube channel with videos with topics that range from beginner to advanced, GreatScott! is another one that explains things really well. Ben Eater has also a very interesting channel. Also check other people's projects similar to things you would like to make. As for kits, I started with the Arduino starter kit, it comes with a project book and a few varied components, after that I started buying components locally or from major international component shops and going towards the things that interested me the most in electronics. I hope this helps :).

Thanks :)

I'm gonna try and keep posting.

Thanks :)

Yeah, I already have another ongoing project based on a cheap FPGA board with a Cyclone II (quite old but it does the job), the idea is to keep it cheaper and much less complex.

The FPGA has a Z80 implementation, video, sound and handle the game controllers. An external Atmega328 is used to handle the SD Card and then just RAM, an ICs for composite video and an op-amp.

I also have some ideas for a better console, maybe a generation forward and an 8-bit computer, but...these are just ideas, I doubt I'll actually get around to do them.

Follow-up — you’ve inspired a colleague and I to do something similar! I read this, iMessaged her the link and said “we have to do this” (she has significant hardware experience. I do not.) and she’s in total agreement!

So thank you again b/c this is legit inspiring and exciting!

Obrigado :)

Thanks :)

Actually they are still being manufactured to this day, that's one thing I didn't mention in the blog post is that you can get a brand new Zilog Z80 today, the 6502 (the CMOS version, 65C02) is also available. You can probably get them from all the major electronic components stores (Digikey, Mouser, etc).

Retro doesn't mean "old." It is a style.