32blit handheld

Discuss anything not related to the current Uzebox design like successors and other open source gaming hardware
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Flecko
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jan 05, 2009 11:50 pm

32blit handheld

Post by Flecko »

Dunno if anyone saw this, but it definitely caught my eye.

It's a handheld console based on an ST ARM chip, brought to you by the folks at Pimoroni. They've already met their funding goals, so now it's just all stretch goals at this point.

Anyways, take a minute to check it out if you get a chance:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pi ... escription

Hope you guys find it as interesting as I did!
olin
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Joined: Sun May 12, 2019 3:16 pm

Re: 32blit handheld

Post by olin »

Looks good, but for half of the price one can have NDS lite (on ebay) with opensource SDK and plethora of interesting games. It reminds me other popular open source consoles from the past (Dingoo A320 or GP32x and others) - 32blit does not seem to be that much different. Still it's nice there's people that design these retro gadgets and make them available. It does not hurt to have more options IMO. I hope it will not end up like ZX Spectrum Vega+ ...
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Jubatian
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Re: 32blit handheld

Post by Jubatian »

Yup, I thought it was kind of trying to do something alike the Pokitto at first glance. It is not that much different as far as I see from the concept, apart from that the MCU is much faster and has more resources.

It is still in a middle ground though, resource-constraints preventing it becoming just another "Raspberry Pi console" (something running a Linux kernel with MAME and likes), but even a lot more powerful than the BitBox. Hurling some ARM assembly at it for the critical elements, I could even imagine it running a true Uzebox emulator (just to stay on-topic). Otherwise in all departments it has more resources than 16 bits PC, so practically any game not using a DOS extender or excessive amounts of XMS / EMS memory would be directly portable to this. By that CPU power and RAM, it would even be able to do ani-aliased 3D without too much trickery (rendering onto a 640x480 canvas, scaling it down to 320x240 for display, even doing this in 8bpp can very much make sense, so it is not like all the RAM taken).
olin
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Joined: Sun May 12, 2019 3:16 pm

Re: 32blit handheld

Post by olin »

Did not know about Pokitto (thanks for the link), but there is quite similar (at least visually) handheld from Hardkernel: Odroid-Go https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-go/
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