2005’s Nintendo Sport Boy Micro was a extremely neat handheld online game console, however I feel we will all agree that it had one main flaw: too massive. What if we might go smaller? What if we might go completely tiny? After all, we wouldn’t wish to lose the traits that make gaming enjoyable, like pixels, buttons, and sounds. Now we will have all of it, because of the EMES (Epic Minimalist Leisure System) designed by Michael — and it even takes lovely little cartridges.
Michael’s purpose was to design a handheld online game console with the entire options we might anticipate, however on a small scale and on the lowest value attainable. EMES is the consequence and it’s charming as heck. The 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 choosing the {hardware} that will deal with processing. Michael selected a Microchip ATtiny10 microcontroller for the job, as a result of it is vitally 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 giant portions), however the ATtiny10 has the correct mixture of value, 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” accommodates the person interface {hardware}, whereas the cartridges include 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 would possibly simply be probably the most distinctive element used on this mission. It’s a classic Plessey GPD340 micro-LED show. We beforehand coated 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 difficult. Both manner, it’s higher than coping with the huge bulk of the Sport Boy Micro.