Pocket Emulator (In Progress)
Introduction
One of the things I have been interested in a lot lately was a retro game emulator. I watched some YouTube videos of people playing the old Nintendo games of the past. I had a Raspberry Pi Zero on hand the past couple months and that device was a perfect candidate for making my own retro game emulator. So to improve my electro-mechanical skills I decided to design my own retro game emulator to relive the memories of the past.
Again, this is a work in progress so I hope to be able to provide updates in the future of this device and to potentially introduce a more refined version.
Original GameBoy (Right) and Pocket Emulator modeled as GameBoy (Left)
The Parts
One of the difficulties in producing a design like this is to find the components that would fit within the space and hardware constraints for the device.
I wanted to make sure that I had an ergonomic device that had at least 4 hours of battery life, wireless charging, and could play games from the NES, SNES, GB, and GBA era of consoles. With these constraints I set myself out to find the parts required for the build.
From my work experience, I learned about a type of screw called Plastite. I wanted to implement these screws into this build as although it would make the device less servicable over the long run, the convenience of no heat-set inserts and the possibility of messing those up outweighed the possibility of me having to print a new case to be able to screw into the part again. So while this project was to help me with space constraints in the design, it was also to help me understand these screws and figure out the best use case for them.
pictures
A view of the retro console with a transparent front allowing one to see the space usage for the project.
A side-on view of the internals and how everything is situated in the case
A rearward view showing the cutouts for the speakers and battery component for the device.