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You may preserve your hulking trendy handheld gaming machines. Compact retro programs? Pah! Do not hassle with any of them when you possibly can go significantly old-school and super-small, each on the identical time, with the EMES—a video games machine that is barely larger than your thumb and has cartridges smaller than a fingernail.
As an entry to Hackaday’s Tiny Video games competitors, if I used to be on the judging panel then the Epic Minimalist Leisure System (EMES) would win hands-down. The foundations of the competitors aren’t remotely strict however the requirements of the previous winners have been excellent. So what makes the EMES particular, then?
Effectively, it is significantly tiny—the entire gadget is not that a lot larger than a one Euro coin and it contains a show, 4 buttons, a slot for the sport ‘cartridges’, and a buzzer. You may suppose that such a small measurement makes it nearly unusable however as you possibly can see within the above video, it is not too onerous to play a number of rounds of Pong on it.
The killer function for me, although, is the dot-matrix LED show. It is a reverse-engineered clone of a Eighties Plessey GPD340, made by the identical one who created the EMES. With simply two characters, through a twin 5 x 7 monochromatic pixel format, it is as fundamental as they arrive however it’s a extremely good match for the challenge. That stated, the hole between the characters does add a component of shock to Pong, so it might be neat to see the EMES with a barely higher show.
Harking back to the earliest sport consoles one might purchase, there isn’t any processor on the board itself. As a substitute, it is embedded within the sport cartridge…properly, plug-in PCB. The dinky board homes an eight-bit ATTiny10 microcontroller, which runs at 8 MHz and boasts simply 1 kB of flash reminiscence and 32 bytes of RAM.
You want one other system to program the ATTiny10, in fact, however that is no totally different to some other video games console that makes use of cartridges. With so many options and such a fundamental microcontroller (it solely has 4 enter/output pins), it is no trivial activity getting all of it to work.
For instance, the buzzer and the show’s brightness management share the identical IO pin, however the creator’s answer was to have the output frequency above the buzzer’s audible vary for full brightness after which drop the frequency, and show’s obligation cycle, to activate the buzzer. The show naturally dims however not sufficient to be an issue.
I really like engineering tasks like this and I love anybody who has the fervour, abilities, and dedication to make one thing like this occur, even when it is just for a enjoyable competitors. The Epic Minimalist Leisure System actually is one thing particular, although—the construct itself could be very prime quality and as somebody who has repeatedly singed his fingers with soldering iron, I am at all times astonished by how anybody could make one thing this small.
