2005’s Nintendo Recreation Boy Micro was a very neat handheld online game console, however I believe we are able to all agree that it had one main flaw: too large. What if we may go smaller? What if we may go completely tiny? After all, we wouldn’t need to lose the traits that make gaming enjoyable, like pixels, buttons, and sounds. Now we are able to have all of it, because of the EMES (Epic Minimalist Leisure System) designed by Michael — and it even takes lovable little cartridges.
Michael’s objective was to design a handheld online game console with the entire options we’d count on, however on a small scale and on the lowest price attainable. EMES is the outcome and it’s charming as heck. Your complete “console” is a PCB about an inch sq.. It has 4 buttons, an itty-bitty micro-LED show, a buzzer, and a cartridge system. Michael has even programmed two AAA video games for the EMES: Pong and Snake.
The event began with deciding on the {hardware} that may deal with processing. Michael selected a Microchip ATtiny10 microcontroller for the job, as a result of it is extremely cheap, even in small portions. It additionally has sufficient functionality to do the job. There are cheaper microcontrollers on the market (particularly if bought in massive portions), however the ATtiny10 has the appropriate mixture of worth, availability, and value.
Taking a web page from the playback of the Milton Bradley Microvision (the primary handheld recreation console to make use of cartridges), Michael gave every cartridge its personal ATtiny10 microcontroller. That eliminates the necessity for a devoted ROM chip on every cartridge and in addition removes the complication (and overhead) required for the microcontroller to entry an exterior ROM. So, the “console” incorporates the person interface {hardware}, whereas the cartridges comprise microcontrollers that retailer and run the sport code. The ATtiny10 doesn’t have many pins obtainable, which pressured Michael to get intelligent about implementation. For instance, one PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation) pin controls each the show brightness and the buzzer.
That show may simply be essentially the most distinctive element used on this undertaking. It’s a classic Plessey GPD340 micro-LED show. We beforehand lined a few of Michael’s work reverse engineering that show and his efforts paid off right here. The GPD340 was designed to show two characters and so it has two 5×7 matrices of LEDs. The video games show their graphics throughout these two matrices, yielding a whopping complete of 70 pixels.
You possibly can most likely think about enjoying Pong on this show, however Snake would undoubtedly be tough. Both approach, it’s higher than coping with the large bulk of the Recreation Boy Micro.