Hacker News Reader

Comment by mittermayr | Hacker News Reader

With Christmas coming up soonish, and many of us going to be locked in at home (even more than ever before), there's a device I can recommend that is fun to build and reasonably fun to build on. It's basically a GameBoy (and runs emulators for it and other devices) for a laughably low price: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/ (first link I found, there may be better ones — I bought it in Europe, where a few of the bigger electronics retailers had it).

It has a color screen and has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. I think I remember it even runs Wifi-Scanners and whatnot (ESP32). Here's some more background info: https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid_go/go_assembling

Just thought that could be an interesting platform to try this on.

View on HN

I really got into these retro handhelds recently and I love them, but I would like to suggest some more options as Odroid has stock issues a lot of the time (do go for them if they're in stock, though, the shipping times are much better than other retro handhelds.)

For cheap, I'd suggest the Pocket Go, [1] but for my favourite I love the RG350P, [2] which is a little more expensive but has a community with a lot of homebrew behind it and it can run pretty much anything from PS1 downwards. There is also the RK2020 [3] with a little more oomph than the RG350P, the RK2020 is a pretty brazen Odroid-Go Advance clone, so if Odroid has the Go Advance in stock, get that instead, but they rarely do.

If you find these just a touch too expensive, they can be found on Banggood for small to hefty discounts. I got my RG350 (not RG350P, the RG350P is a minor improvement over the RG350 but at around the same price) for $60 on Banggood. Also, expect 1-2 month shipping on these consoles, but in my opinion it's so worth it.

[1] https://retromimi.com/collections/handhelds/products/pocketg... [2] https://retromimi.com/collections/handhelds/products/rg350p [3] https://retromimi.com/collections/handhelds/products/rk2020

I've been somewhat thinking of getting one of these handheld Game Boy-esque systems, so it's nice to see some options and opinions, thank you. Does the RG350P provide any other software besides emulation (Pico-8 support for example), or is that about it?

There are basically three broad sets of handhelds: OpenDingux devices, ARM Linux devices, and Android ones. The RG350P is an OpenDingux device.

There's a lot of OpenDingux devices- they have MIPS CPUs, so they don't run the same variety of software as the ARM-based ones. There's still a bunch of homebrew for OpenDingux, but it's not exactly organized, compared to Android and Linux devices. It involves hunting down poorly-documented executables, etc. Here's one list of software available:

https://github.com/retrogamehandheld/OpenDingux

There are two Pico-8 emulators that run on those things, tac08 and retro8. They both work on many games, but it's a bit hit-and-miss.

https://0xcafed00d.itch.io/tac08-rg350 / https://github.com/Jakz/retro8

However, it is apparently possible to get the official Raspberry Pi version of pico-8 running on the Odroid Go Advance, which is an ARM CPU running Linux, just like the RPi.

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=193&t=37256&start=8...

Additionally to that, I dug up a version of TIC-80 ( https://tic80.com/ ), an open-source PICO-like environment, compiled for the OpenDingux which will run on the RG350:

https://github.com/retrogamehandheld/OpenDingux/raw/master/E...

Do you assemble these yourself? I don't really care that much about the console, more about the fun and reward of building it yourself. I see it more as a fun project.

In the case of Odroid Go and Odroid Go Advance, yes. The others no, they're more like an actual product.

You do assemble the Odroid Go & Go Advance, but it's a matter of dropping the buttons into place, plugging the screen & battery into the single PCB, dropping that into the shell, and screwing it together. It's not very involved, but enjoyable.

If it can play Game Boy games I’ve made an easy to use game maker that’s starting to get quite popular https://www.gbstudio.dev/

Wow It is really cool to see you on hackernews as well. I have programmed 2 different gameboy advance games for game jams in the past. But building it from scratch is really hard. Most resources are down with the exception of TONC https://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/ So you will have to use the spec sheets a lot. Gbstudio is very well made and easy to use. But if you are looking for a challenge i will leave the trivial excessive to you, the reader.

I ordered ODroidGO about a year ago. Back then the worst part of the handheld was the screen. It was a cheap TFT screen with very poor viewing angles. The console is also not very comfortable, my (adult) hands start to hurt after about 1h of playing. In the end, as too many gadgets before, ODroidGo is gathering dust in one of the forgotten boxes in my home...

The most difficult part, during the assembly process, was connecting the "ribbon" from the main board to the screen. Be careful as it is way too easy to lock the ribbon than to unlock it from the socket.

Not all games are working, but I managed to run both Mario and Wario (GBC) on it. Some games are not working, some you can play but the save feature is not working. The battery life is impressive, comparing to my smartphone.

This is really underpowered....

For the same money you can get a powkiddy or something simillar, running linux and with support for GBA, (S)NES, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNrpVhP8fDc

All the usual suspects (ebay, aliexpress,...) have it.

also firmware: https://github.com/TriForceX/MiyooCFW

Those don't have GPIO pins, the Odroid Go does. There's something inherently charming about being able to run emulated games on a microcontroller. Also, because it's an ESP32, it supports Arduino so playing around with programming it is fairly straightforward.

The Go has good battery life, instant-on, and has a certain DIY spirit. I don't know if it's possible to run MakeCode programs directly on the Odroid Go but it would probably be doable for someone with more knowledge of these things.

You're speaking my language. This is a shameless self plug but we - that is Pimoroni - are working on 32blit which is an STM32F750-based microcontroller games console that should be up for general sale soooon - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pimoroni/32blit-retro-i...

Our beta backer tier have been godlike in their ability to make the STM32 do things I'd never thought we'd see... much less see before it's even launched. I mean it already has a Doom port.

I think, compared to the off-the-shelf Emu handhelds on which I cut my teeth (as far back as GP2X and Dingoo A320 days) it's underpowered and overpriced but you're dead on the money that they have a different charm and set of challenges.

MakeCode compiles down to native instructions, IIRC, so it should run on pretty much anything capable of running a screen that meets their - relatively forgiving - specs - https://arcade.makecode.com/hardware/adding

Edit: GP2X not GP32X!

Yes, MakeCode compiles (in the web browser) to ARM machine code. The MakeCode team is very interested in new handhelds. Any handheld that can run MakeCode Arcade games will also be able to run TileCode, which is built using MakeCode Arcade.

I've been keeping an eye on the 32blit, glad to hear there will be a general release! I ported my game framework to the Cortex-M0+ Gamebuino earlier, and Cortex-M7 with FPU and 1MB RAM are next level in comparison, sounds more capable for computation than the GP2X too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com