DIY Video Game Console

How difficult would it be to produce your own bootleg video game console? It doesn't all have to be from scratch, but how hard would it be to make something like a plug n play console that allows you to play games/homebrew you've made?

It depends on what you're doing with it. A Raspberry Pi 3 or better is an excellent emulation platform, allowing decent gameplay all the way to PS2-era gaming. However, you can go all the way down to a RasPi Zero if you're talking about simple games or NES-or-earlier emulation. I would look into existing projects involving this hardware before considering making one's own console.

>>5129 buy odroid and this case, done

I would love to make some custom controller for ps2 emulator, i just need key inputs. If anyone has any info please share.

I've had this project for a while now. Basically what other Lains say is right, the heart of your whole operation would be a raspberry pi running an os or something that would launch your game. Kinda related, here's a cool video of a pretty cool project of someone who made their own game console from scratch. It even worked with cartridges and soykaf.

>>5133 God damnit I didn't paste the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTGOEe8f8ls

>>5132 digispark

A raspberry py, any laptop/pc motherboard with a custom shell and something like retroarch... You got a lot of options. You're not specifying how are you gonna do those homebrew games, OP, so, it's impossible to know what you can do. Nonetheless, the biggest obstacle is the lesrning curve of homebrewing games, not the system. You can make vidya in any programming language, for example

Literally use your computer. Get a USB controller or whatever. Or do you have more specific requirements for it to be considered a "video game console" that allows you to develop your own stuff? If so, state them silly.

>>5129 The Russians already did that in the 90s.

>>5129 >homebrew There used to be PSP homebrew but the problem is there weren't enough games developed for it except for those sorry-looking pokemon clones. I've seen a bunch of random kickstarters in the past few years. Surprisingly enough maybe you could make a DIY console too like that guy who made the open source laptop but the problem is who would develop a game for a fairly new device? Game development takes years or months. Another is you could just get one of those 100in1 bootleg N64 gameboys on china and homebrew your own ROM.bin traditionally. >[retro console kickstarter ] >search result https://www.clockworkpi.com/

>>5562 up to these days Chinese still sell Famicom clones.

>>5129 CHIP-8 is a little virtual machine specifically designed for playing games, with the original implementation for the RCA 1802, which had the COSMAC VIP as a kit people could build. It lives on, and this is an annual game jam for it, with the latest as of writing being the seventh: http://octojam.com There's 3.5KiB or less of memory available, varying, and just a few dozen instructions, which include things games need, such as drawing sprites, generating random numbers, and displaying scores as decimal numbers, along with more fundamental instructions. The screen is small, at 32 by 64 or 64 by 128, again varying, and monochromatic. There's a monotone speaker and a timer. It's simpler than basically anything else, and while this limits the games, it also dramatically lowers the barrier to new games being made. It's so simple, a Super CHIP-8 was made for the HP 48 series of calculators, so that games would be easier to develop for it. At the least, it should be a good first step.

As others have mentioned this is an interesting discussion topic but you've failed to explain what you really wanna do. >>5129 I don't know much about it but a lot of the retro consoles have great dev tools these days. I'd imagine you'll find something to your liking here: http://techdocs.exodusemulator.com/Console/SegaMegaDrive/Software.html Then all you need is a Genesis and a megaSD and you can have all your homebrew and probably every sega game all on one cartridge, play them on a real console, etc. You could build a console from scratch. I believe opencores and the free IPs that come with the free version of quartus prime would each have everything you need. You could get a rpi and write games in linux. Honestly probably the easiest but least console-y

>>5134

You can try making the Famicube real: https://androidarts.com/palette/Famicube.htm#storytime >Floppy disks as medium How cool is that?

>>5934 Forgot pic.

>>5129 I would feel proud to be intelligent enough to make a z80 computer, but am not, OP. I'd try to learn to do that with IC chips and all of that jazz. They have a book for it, buliding a z80 computer. Also, the original gameboy was basically a z80 they say. Though I are baka myself.

>>5129 It can be as easy as taking an off the shelf x86_64 or maybe ARM based computer (single board or not, doesn't matter). The hardest part will be writing games for it. I've made tons of custom hardware but writing games is the most difficult honestly, you need artistic skills, first and foremost, which I lack. Then again, you could make it quite hard by starting from scratch and taking a 8 or 32 bit microcontroller, designing a console, and writing games for it. >>5132 You basically need a device to emulate an HID device. You can use either a microcontroller with USB (I prefer STM32) or if you want wireless, bluetooth (I've only used ESP32, but NRF51s and 52s exist as well). If you just want to get done, you can use an Arduino board with USB support and buttons and joysticks >>5933 I2C eeprom?