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Arduboy

arduboy.com

309 pointstosh95 comments

Hello! I'm the creator of the Arduboy, thanks for sharing! This is the new Arduboy FX with over 200 games all made by other members of the community all free and open source. If you don't want to buy, there are lots of instructions of how to make your own DIY version too. If you have the original Arduboy you can upgrade using a mod chip. (Backordered too - thanks chip shortage)

Would like to make a new console using the RP2040 and a larger color screen. Also interested in music/synth. Happy to answer any questions you have, thanks again! AMA!

Hey, I backed the original model and just preordered the new one. Super cool device.

Huzzah! Thanks! Without you and others like you none of this would be possible!

Looks cool, does this require you to power cycle the device when you want to quit a game?

Thanks! The menu is also accessible via software with a button combo. Hold up and down at the same time for 3 seconds and the Arduboy FX will reset to the boot menu. More info about how it works here: https://www.arduboy.com/quick-start

Thanks. I was looking at a quick youtube review and it seems they hadn't figured this out yet.

Are you aware that all featured game blog entries feature Lorem Ipsum text?

https://www.arduboy.com/blog

Hehe, yes blog needs fixing. Thanks for reminder that some people try to read it. I switched to squarespace (somewhat) recently and haven't got around to it updating. Latest activity is at https://community.arduboy.com/

Thanks for fixing it and the link to the forums!

How about describing what it is. It sounds like an arduous boy, which would be a weird thing to post on HN.

I thought the name implied Arduino Gameboy and sure enough that's what it is! Seems like a good intuitive name.

The linked page describes it very clearly. The largest fonts on the page say: "8-bit Gaming In Your Wallet" and next to this sentence there is a picture of a credit card sized gaming console.

Just in case you are genuinely curious about the name: it is evocative of the word "arduino", the popular microcontroller based dev-board and "gameboy" the small gaming console.

Why would a hacker care about this? have you ever wanted to fully understand the full stack you are developing for? It's most often hopeless. Even if you work only on open source operating systems, you won't be able to get the documentation of all the chips in your system. Here you can read all the datasheets, and all the code which happens between someone pressing a button and a pixel appearing on the screen. What

The spellchecker on every new computer I use agrees with you ;)

Hey there, great job! I've been messing with Arduino and Rpi's for years, but just recently started trying to go lower level with some Atmega AVR's, while learning the fundamentals of circuit design. Your project is almost exactly what I want to do - build a functional PCB from scratch that does...something useful. Any learning materials you'd suggest?

Awesome to hear! These are a bunch of resources, tons of info. If you aren't finding what you need use the search or start a new topic. Have fun! DIY Gallery: https://community.arduboy.com/c/arduboy/homemade/43 DIY Guide: https://community.arduboy.com/t/12-arduboy-compatible-system... Schematic: https://community.arduboy.com/t/production-arduboy-schematic... Board-Package: https://github.com/MrBlinky/Arduboy-homemade-package

Please consider adding another means of payment besides PayPal. I’d buy this in an instant if I could use Stripe/Apple Pay/Anything but Paypal.

What sort of display interface would you go for if you did the rp2040 thing? SPI doesn't really go fast enough. MIPI DSI is tricky. Are there any panels that do the simplicity of VGA style R,G,B,H,V (which the rp2040 has already shown aptitude at handling)

Specifically the ST7735, 128x128 color LCD (available in IPS too) using SPI, it goes plenty enough. Should be able to max out the display, perhaps not at full color depth, but good enough. Still learning that platform though, I tried last year but there wasn't enough resources for noobs like me. Messed around with ESP32 earlier but it's power draw is too high: https://community.arduboy.com/t/micro-arcade-reverse-enginee...

I can not buy via PayPal - can pay with normal credit card number input (maybe Stripe?), SEPA, cryptocurrency, or maybe a bank transfer in USD with Transferwise or Revolut. Please let me know if any such payment method would be possible to use for an order :-) Or I’ll take you out skiing and treat you to dinner if you come to Scandinavia

Paypal allows you to check out as a guest using a credit card but I understand some people it is still restricted or prefer not to. I'll look into other options, thanks!

Just checked again, and that option is not displayed - maybe not available in my country, or not possible for some other reason.

We could maybe just make an invoice and I pay it whatever way is possible for both and preferable to you.

Thanks for letting me know! It is set up to allow it in paypal so it looks like squarespace integration does not allow the guest checkout option. I'll look at adding stripe to the page, otherwise you can place the pre-order with our distributor if that works better: https://www.seeedstudio.com/Arduboy-FX-p-4913.html

Seconding the other user's issue. I'm in the US and there is no option to check out as guest. Not really interested in making a PayPal account at this time.

Really impressed with this project, and its price point. Amazing work.

Hey I'm really happy that you've provided an option for people to upgrade their OG arduboys with the new FX chip, but it seems I'm being charged $15 USD (same as the cost of the chip) to have it shipped to me, is there any chance to revisit the price to send the modchip to AU? :D

As another Australian, I highly doubt they have much of a say in terms of how expensive shipping to us internationally is, right now.

Unfortunately prices have gone up a lot. USPS won't even ship packages to Australia any more due to some dispute so it has to use some 3rd party service to get there. The only thing I can suggest is if you can get together with your friends, the shipping rate is flat fee you can split it that way.

I like the design of your modchip. I'm a lead engineer on a pretty expensive multi-PCB product so whenever we have updates either from unavailable parts or customer directed changes, we have to add in little patch boards. We've had to fit all kinds of shaped PCBs into tiny areas. Sometimes we get lucky and there's a perfectly sized empty spot that can take some glue, sometimes we don't get lucky and we'll have a small board mounted to whatever nearby screws we can find. As difficult as it is making changes to a design that was never meant to be flexible, I both love and hate the challenge so I can definitely appreciate creative solutions like yours.

I keep my Arduboy in my wallet and it's a great party trick - great project, will be grabbing a mod chip for sure! :)

How big is your wallet?

Pretty thick. I trimmed it down recently. Dropping the Arduboy would certainly help.

Curious to hear your thoughts on the play date?

I love it! Not sure about the crank but everything else is incredible! I tried to go memory LCD but I couldn't get sharp to talk to me and was also too expensive at the time. I'd love to join their team! I've pestered Cabel for a job but I think he has bigger plans. Maybe I should start an Arduboy on Playdate petition? :D

It's really awesome to see to see all these other consoles follow in Arduboy's footsteps. Arduboy as not the first console like this but, I'm biased, I think it has been the best.

Really, I'm excited to see the entire industry of things like this grow, and it's nice to know I'm a part of it in some way.

Would be great to see arduboy games on playdate!

I have come to see the playdate as being a spiritual successor to the Arduboy and have been happy with how popular it has been so far.

I like the mechanical design. Do you have any blog posts about creating the plastic mold and having the plastic parts produced (I looked around and didn't find anything)?

I've got a video visiting the factory actually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQI6GNvhmro

Looks like you had a great trip to SZ. Did Seeed take care of the plastic parts too, or was that a separate cm?

Hello, is the website down since yesterday or are you blocking all connections from Tor (if so why?) ?

Any chance of a USB-C variant coming around? I'm currently migrating everything I can to USB-C to eliminate needing to keep various types of charging cables around.

Past related threads:

Arduboy – A game system the size of a credit card - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058148 - Nov 2016 (94 comments)

Arduboy – Open Source Card-Sized Gaming Board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443635 - Sept 2016 (25 comments)

Arduboy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11467731 - April 2016 (1 comment)

Arduboy: The Interactive Digital Entertainment Card - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8127022 - Aug 2014 (2 comments)

Arduboy: The Interactive Digital Business Card - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7325486 - March 2014 (23 comments)

Amazing project. Poor marketing. Authors should put in huge bold letters: no in app purchase, no subscriptions, no spying on you, just pure joy of gaming.

I found the marketing to be very concise. Small device, games preloaded, make your own games. While the points you make may be important to you, I don't think they're the key selling points of such a device.

Nice tip thanks :) I added it to the buy-now page: https://www.arduboy.com/buy-now

It's not really about playing games. The project seems to target people who want to learn microcontroller programming with a fun interface. Sure you can load community games on but that seems a lot less fun than making your own since the display and microcontroller are so limited you aren't getting much on there.

Interestingly, I originally bought it with this mindset (kickstarter 1/10000 owner here) but, life had other plans and basically it's become a very useful desktop toy playing exclusively breakout... and I couldn't be happier with it?

I do intend to program something for it, sometime, but, just can't spend any spare time on it right now.

If I did have the time, I'd really like to revive some of the past attempts at building games in Rust for the thing.

Haha yeah I also got one and haven't used it yet. My interest in micro controller programming comes and goes and if I have to wait for shipping before I can start my project, I'll be over it before the thing arrives. Breakout does sound like the perfect game for it though.

Here is a devlog on developing for it. Warning, it will make you buy one.

https://mattgreer.dev/blog/squeezing-the-arduboy-for-every-b...

I had a blast making an asteroids clone for the arduboy:

https://twitter.com/00jknight/status/993188057812742144

hope my game is on this thing!

here is the code for it: https://github.com/jknightdoeswork/ardutoids

Is there any hardware improvements to the arduboy fx? I found the screen scratches easily and the on/off switch is easy to break

Another excellent device in this genre is the RP2040-based PicoSystem from Pimoroni.

Surprisingly good build quality, but don’t have a big library of games yet. I guess it has to do with Pimoroni making things more for the DIY-crowd rather than for indie game devs.

Anyhow loved more here by the 4 year old than the Nintendo DS.. :)

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/picosystem

My dream version is this exact form factor but capable of running games similar to pico-8 games. Something that has an MMU and can load binaries from external sources but does not necessarily run a full OS.

An ESP32 version anyone? :)

This is what the Odroid Go was, but it's been discontinued. There's an Arduboy firmware for it. I think there are still some other slightly less polished ESP32 handhelds around, but the Odroid Go was a great (and cheap) little thing.

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?t=42463

I mean, there's still the Odroid Go Advance and the Odroid Go Super:

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go-advance-black-edit...

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go-super-clear-white/

... which are Linux(?) handhelds with Ghz+ multicore ARM chips. Quite different.

> This is what the Odroid Go was

I have one and it's a really nice piece of hardware that runs lots of games at native speed. Thanks to being an open platform, I'll probably turn it into some sort of WiFi terminal or else. For sure it won't collect dust in a drawer like many closed devices do when they become old. The Arduboy seems a nice little device, however at that price it is less appealing than say the Odroid Go Advance which has much powerful hardware but costs only $5 more. I wonder if they could axe the costs even further by not making the entire device but only a board with buttons, display and battery charging circuitry, which could host one of those cheap ATmega32u4 boards.

Sounds like the Gamebuino.

https://gamebuino.com/

Yep this is pretty close!

thanks, looks good

Same, but tic-80 instead. :)

You and me both. There is already a lot out there similar running linux. Odroid go and other things running open dingux. Pico-8 as it stands needs a lot of horsepower as it's all lua scripts. I've talked to Lex about making a dedicated pico-8 console he says it would be tough, you basically need fully PC hardware to be faithful to what the virtual console should be able to do. I'm certain a lot of carts could be cross compiled into binaries and run just fine though he wasn't excited about that approach.

There's a couple of pico-8 emulators that run on Dingux, the problems they have seem mostly due to incompatibilities rather than computing power

https://github.com/Jakz/retro8

https://0xcafed00d.itch.io/tac08-rg350

I was wondering if Nim could be a good tool here by compiling to C, here is a PICO-8 inspired lib written in it:

https://github.com/ftsf/nico

If you're up for some hacking and soldering iron use, the Nintendo game and watch systems can be modded pretty easily to load more games, or homebrew code of your own creation. I don't think there's a pico-8 port yet, but it is a tiny little ARM Cortex-M4 board with a nice color screen, dpad, and buttons that you can load any bare metal code and go wild. There's a lot of good info here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameAndWatchMods/

Cortex-M7, actually! The STM32H7B0 is a surprisingly capable processor.

The main limitation of the Game and Watch platform is the lack of any standard external interface -- while the system has a USB port, it's only used for charging. I've seen a couple of creative solutions to the problem, but they all require some pretty significant soldering skills.

It looks like there are some unused pins, some ADCs, a uart, and i2c unused; are these (plus +v and gnd) exposed as an accessible header/breakout?

All of the unused pins are broken out to clearly labeled test pads on the back of the PCB (inside of the case), in fact this is what made the mod-chip easy/possible!

I made Tetris[0] on mine a few years back. Surprisingly, at almost the exact same time the Tetris MicroCard[1] was released, which was an officially licensed Tetris device based on the Arduboy. It was a crazy coincidence.

I still love my Arduboy! It's really fun to program on.

[0]: https://github.com/buzzert/Ardutris

[1]: https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_MicroCard

Looks really cool! Not sure how often I'll use it, but I ordered one anyway :)

Seems similar to what CircuitMess is making (https://circuitmess.com/), only they're targeting kids and STEM education.

USB-C please :)

Yes, why use the old micro-usb port? Now I would need a separate cable just to charge this.

I don't disagree, I've wanted to switch to usb-c for a while. Several reasons. It was designed with Micro-USB 8 years ago, would have to make new molds for the new connector. (approx $20k) USB-C would fit but just barely because it is thicker. Connectors are more expensive and cables are more expensive. It includes a Micro-USB cable so we got you covered there. Bluetooth and wireless charging, and you wouldn't even need ports :)

Interested but burnt too many times. Wait for the delivery and will buy one. I like the helping to programme it.

Uh? This is "ancient", like from 2015 and they state that they have more than 500 in stock.

Should be easy to find reviews, videos etc to learn more.

Really feels low-risk unless I'm missing something major.

> they state that they have more than 500 in stock.

It doesn't seem to be in stock, the product page says "Pre-Order Shipping Estimate: May 2022".

These are pre-orders being fulfilled by our contract manufacturer Seeed Studio. The order for 1,000 units is in and paid with them just waiting on delivery. We have been around for over 6 years and only had a handful of unsatisfied customers. Refunds are processed at any time so if you change your mind because this chip shortage is ridiculous, it's totally understood. Don't take my word for it though head over to https://community.arduboy.com/ and see for yourself!

Uh, okay, I clearly mis-read that then, thanks.

They exist, you can buy them on amazon. I own a few from a few years ago.

But I fully agree with you, 99% of kickstarter style projects are complete scams.

Arduboy is legit, these have been around and in production for years. There have been clones that sold with licensed games (Galaga, Tetris, etc.) in big brick and mortar stores like Target. It's a great little game system with a big community. It's also basically an Arduino with game-specific hardware attached (screen, buttons) so you can treat it just like an original Arduino board for hacking around with stuff.

Good news. They shipped years ago. I have one

What kind of licensing is this under? Can someone make a one-off hardware implementation and sell them freely?

At least the core library seems to be BSD: https://github.com/Arduboy/Arduboy/blob/master/LICENSE

The pinout compatibility is public domain. The software is covered under it's respective licenses, the most popular library is now this: https://github.com/MLXXXp/Arduboy2 and is BSD. The name Arduboy is covered under US trademark. If you want to make your own clone, there are several out there already, you just can't use the trademark or include any games that carry it.

> include any games that carry it.

I see many games are open source so, why not? Just being curious.

I think because they extend usage of their trademark to games (so their hardware will look more attractive) but restrict its use by other hardware manufacturers (to maintain their lock-in)

>you just can't use the trademark or include any games that carry it.

Sounds like a good lock-in.

Excited to see more and more new retro gaming handhelds like this, good job!

Can't wait for the landfill to be filled with these in 10 years time... I genuinely do not understand the appeal, even as a former indie developer.

I don't see why we need yet another tiny gaming console that's like the NES, except not. It has tiny buttons that look painful to use, it's credit card sized so you can barely hold the thing, it has an outdated usb port so it's not compatible with any of your devices, and a tiny screen that's going to shine in the sunlight.

I wonder where all the copies of the OUYA are now. Or the PlayJam Gamestick[0] (Whose founders sold out, then pivoted to bespoke software, and their site is no longer online now). Or any of the other thousands of consoles and gaming devices like these, after 10 years when the actual hardware is outdated and about 5 other things that are exactly the same came out except with an OLED screen and other things that make it nicer.

Despite raising 600k, the only place you can get the PlayJam Gamestick is on Ebay, for the shocking price of... 35 pounds. Because literally nobody wants one. It's value is zero, 10 years after the fact. The same for the OUYA (Which had more hype and is slightly cheaper now). The Caanoo, the GCW Zero, the GPD XD, etc. are all lying in the gutter. They either crashed when they tried to take off, or they crashed after 10 years.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do understand the appeal of things like the Analogue Pocket -- it has both Homebrew appeal, and the possibility of playing original, 1980s game carts, that is hardware accurate, along with homebrew. A developer making a game for this can know their game works on the original hardware, too! It's an alternative to emulators for time-tested and beloved hardware, so it has staying power.

This, like it's predecessors, objectively doesn't have that. It seems like a waste of resources.

[0]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/872297630/gamestick-the...

I mean, you're using a computer right now that's probably 10 times the ecological impact of an arduboy once you toss it. And you're going to go through many of them.

I own a few arduboys and I like making games for people and giving them the console itself as a desk toy. It's pretty nice to use all things considered, and I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it.

It doesn't seem like a huge problem for someone to make this, even if other works exist close to it. Especially since it's barely going to effect your own life. Just don't buy it.

The replacement rate for computers is slowing substantially but the production of throwaway fast-fashion tech doodads and gizmos is increasing YOY. Also, that whataboutism looks past the utility of the computer vs the arduboy. "It doesn't seem like a huge problem" but perhaps our consumption generally is a problem and this is but one symptom. "Just don't buy it." talks past the PC because they are looking at this as a societal issue.

> I mean, you're using a computer right now that's probably 10 times the ecological impact of an arduboy once you toss it. And you're going to go through many of them.

I've gone through 3 or 4 computers in the last 20 years and I can sell the computer on to a retro enthusiast, and not only will they know what it is, but they will pay for it.

But then, I've only ever bought Thinkpads, which more or less hold their appreciation value across time.

Not to mention, it's also 10, maybe 100 times the utility, as well.

Anecdotal, but I still have and use my GPD XD regularly. It's better than 99% of 'retro' handhelds out there and it holds together well. There's a guy out there updating it to a recent Android version too.

Not all of us succumb to the latest flavour of the month, and wasteful people are naturally wasteful regardless. If it's not this, it'll just be something else.

The impression I got from the project is that it isn't about just loading premade games on but its about giving you a fun and accessible development platform for microcontrollers. I don't think this will be obsolete in 10 years because microcontrollers will have mostly the same requirements.

And yet there are about half a dozen other projects that I've described that cover the exact same space -- retro development, hobbyist. And they're either on Ebay for a fraction of the price, or in landfill.

Ultimately I don't think it matters that much here. The thing comes packed in a thin sleeve that fits in an envelope and contains very few materials. You would likely do better for the environment by passing on a single steak for dinner. The Arduboy is the least of my concerns.

We are a different company with a different model to all of these businesses and products you have mentioned. It's intended to learn how to code on bare metal system using a language that both approachable and powerful, C++. Developing homebrew using assembly is tough. You can learn a lot by developing for a true 8 bit system and Arduino makes it easy and accessible.

It's ok to be a nay-sayer but you are super late to the party. We're on year 6 so maybe check back in 4 and see how we are doing! :)

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