Two new minimalist pocket games

The peak of Arduboy's popularity is already over, but the development by geeks of minimalistic consoles similar in ideology continues. And here are two new designs by authors under the nicknames Igor and davedarko, which saw the light of late.

The first of them - ESP Little Game Engine - is presented immediately on two resources: Hackaday.io (description) and GitHub (code). It is executed on the ESP8266, displays the image on a TFT display with an ILI9341 controller, and eight buttons are connected to the ESP via the I ² C bus using the PCF8574 port expander. 32 sprites are implemented in software, as well as their rotation and collision detection. It is curious that at first the device diagram was not given - and this is with firmware under the GPL. But after the "bug report" in the comments ...


... the developer laid out the scheme: You can



compile and debug games for the console in an IDE that works directly in the browser , it looks like this:



The emulator requires a physical keyboard, other IDE functions also work on the touch.

The author’s version of the console is placed in the housing from Game Boy; in your performance, it may be different.


The second console is made on the ATiny85 microcontroller (you can try to adapt DigiSpark somehow), it uses the same OLED display as in Arduboy. At first, the story of it was also conducted on Hackaday.io , and the developer assumed that the buttons would be connected by charliplexing. Do not be surprised, so you can connect not only LEDs, but also buttons, in series with each of which a diode is turned on. The circuit went like this:



And the console assembled from it looked like this:



Having posted a small piece of code, the author said that he was switching to another way of connecting the buttons - using resistors (the microcontroller determines which button is pressed, by which resistor is connected to it), and posted a video:


And he stopped publishing project updates on Hackaday.io, but from the video description it follows that it was shot for the Element14 website (by the way, this is silicon). Well, follow the developer there and find this page .

Here the project is already up to date, the Code.zip and Schematics.zip archives are laid out , the information in which is enough to repeat the console. The software part of the project is also under the GPL (update: in the comment of the developer himself on Element14 it says that the software is forked from here ).

The new way to connect the buttons uses fewer microcontroller pins, which made it possible to make this console, unlike the previous one, not “dumb”. The scheme was as follows:



In this form, the device does not fit the definition of "handheld", since it is impossible to play with the "skeleton" in hand - it is deformed. You can put it on a table, or you can simply stick it, for example, to an old unnecessary RFID, as the user under the nickname xlamzerg did:



It is unlikely that both consoles will be as successful as Arduboy, or a very interesting, but not open source Dodo console, made on the present 6502 (about it somehow later). They will not have pages on various "-starts", The Tetris Company will not pay attention to them and will not offer to release an option under their brand. But there is no doubt that they will repeat them. Let in smaller quantities, but will be required.