This was one of the most interesting and challenging project I made during a hackathon. This was created during the Goldsmith's Anvil Hack on March 22nd, 2015.

I love retro gaming, I wanted a device that gives me the feeling of a retro console, but that allows me to play other games on it! So I Worked on the Nintendo GamePI! A lot of person saw the potential behind the raspberry PI and the 'retropie project', when they tried to create a retro gaming device they made it complicated by using components very hard to find and put together!

Before this hackathon I had a bunch of hardware pieces coming from an older project with the raspberry PI (the nintendo NES PI). I had the idea that the Nintendo GamePI would suit AnvilHack perfectly! So I bought the few remaining pieces online (wires, dmg panel control, broken gameboy etc...) and waited for the hackathon! The combination of both software and hardware I am using is completely new. In other projects they use a hdmi type screen, however I use a screen made by adafruit that use the GPIO pins to work! I had to reroute the hdmi to the screen, but that was not the hardest part. The screen is using really specific GPIO pins, the challenge was to setup the control of the gameboy by avoiding every single pins used by the screen (a lot of die and retry!). I also reused scripts, linked them and tweaked them so they can work together; also by using drivers and parts that were not meant to work together. Another challenge was to setup the raspberry pi to use fbcp (as a frame buffer driver) because the GPIO screen does not handle another type of framebuffer driver. After the work on the raspberry pi I had to work and fit pretty much everything in a gameboy case... This was really hard, it would have been easier with other hardware components (extension GPIO cord for example) but at the end I managed to fit everything into it!

The concept and the hardware combination I am using is quiet efficient and upgradable! You can print your own case if you want, put it in a bigger broken console! The possibilities are nearly endless! The raspberry PI is easily powered by a 5v battery too (for example, your phone battery pack).