Gameboy

I made a simple, standalone, and customizable gaming console that fits in your hand! It costs less than $20 to make, and goes for 20h before needing a new battery.

The hardest part of this project was the code. I didn't have a lot of experience in coding before I started this project! I didn't know C++ very well either. This project taught me a lot about software. I had to learn how to make clever workarounds, optimize, and debug. It was all really fun though! I ended up with a program that has a menu, three games, and quality-of-life features (like the option to turn the volume off). Still, there is room for a fourth add-on game for you to code! I get that this was a hardware project, but the code was really the biggest challenge.

The thing I am proudest about in this project is the case. I am a long-time 3D printing guy, but this case was one of the toughest "cases" I've seen (haha get it?) The walls had to be extremely thin in order to stay on the Arduino while avoiding the pin headers. I had to customize the slicer settings in order to get them to be solid. Though this wasn't as hard as the code, it was the first time I had really went in-depth into the settings of my slicer to fix a problem like this. I am pretty proud of that :)

This project was started in Hack Club's Horizons program, and moved after 15h were completed to capitalize on Stardance's more hardware-friendly system. Though I planned to improve the Gameboy's case here (and make the batteries replaceable), I realized that that was extremely impractical and ditched the idea. Instead, I stuck with my plan of improving the code. That is why I only have one devlog here on Stardance (oops)! The rest of my devlogs are in my journal.md file in my GitHub repo.

I hope you try making my take on the Gameboy yourself, for you will have as much fun as I did!