Self made Gaming Console

It is possible to create your own computing device capable of running games, yes.

All the electronic components needed are all available to the public for individual use somewhere or another.

That is assuming you mean starting from scratch with nothing more than ideas and components.

Although possible, it is highly impractical, as it would take a very extensive knowledge of electronics and engineering to create one successfully.

Not to mention that the amount of time needed for any one individual to design, create, build, and test such a homemade computing device would be astonishing.

The Raspberry Pi (Running Linux) and Ouya (Running Android) for example, were created and built by a team of people, all of which had extensive knowledge in this field.

With that said, don't let what I have said above deter you from trying if it is something you are serious about and dedicated to.

Never give up on your ideas or projects and never let anyone including yourself tell you that you cannot do it.

Hi Corey - I think Thomas is trying to give Ben Heck an idea for something for his show. I answered a couple of the suggestions to him from his fans when I first started and was told it was just a suggestion for the show. The clue is that it is not listed as a question and it comes in under the Ben Heck Show listing. Your reply is accurate and good though.

John

Thanx man.

Ouya could be cool but RPI costs less.

And If I get it on Kickstarter. would you buy it?

I wanted to make it an Idea. wanted to see what Ben would have made.

I like the idea and it would be something I would possibly back on kickstarter.

Really depends on the concept, full idea of it's capabilities, and of course target price.

A wonderful example for this topic would be 'Pandora' which was a open source handheld console developed by OpenPandora GmbH.

This is proof that this idea and concept can in fact be done.

The problem with Pandora was, the pre-purchase price was $350 and another $350 to get the upgraded version.

Backers also ended up having to wait upwards around 4 years to receive it and were disappointed in its quality.

The point is, someone had an idea similar to yours and made it happen.

I would recommend the book "The Black Art of Videogame Console Design" by Andre Lamothe for reading material.

For a tinkertoy, look into building a Gamebuino clone (http://gamebuino.com/), because the schematic is available, the parts are cheap, it has the advantages of being Arduino based, and a community developing software.

When I get the prototype ready. I could begin it at Kickstarter.=My plan

I am going to add you as a contact on here if you wouldn't mind.

I would like to follow your progress on the project.

I had kicked the idea around a bit but just dont have time to work on it.

Cory, you are right about the difficulty but that is directly proportional to the level of gaming console you want to build. Ill note here that my first computer was a z80 with 4k of ram and it played lots of games. So at that level you could build a console with the following.

An Arduino - ArduinoProMini as the base system. You would then need to mod the 2boots boot loader to load from an SPI EEprom instead of the SD card.

https://github.com/thseiler/embedded/tree/master/avr/2boots

This means that you could build cartridges for it and simply plug in the cartage and boot the unit.

You could use the TV-OUT like this

arduino-tvout - A composite video output library for AVR/Arduino - Google Project Hosting

To connect it to a TV

You may need to build a joystick as it is hard to find the old traditional Atari style joysticks. However that is easly doable with the following and a 3d printer.

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/JoyStick

You could even put it into a Keyboard like the early computers and connect the keyboard via

Arduino Playground - PS2Keyboard

Then the first cartage could be basic

https://github.com/BleuLlama/TinyBasicPlus

Yep you could program it in basic right from the keyboard. This would be a good approximation of the early console/computer systems of the 1980's

You are completely right Cyber, it is dependent on the level of gaming, although typically when I think of console I think of consoles like the Atari, Ouya, Xbox, Playstation etc.

Similar to what you have listed above, rather than using an Arduino however, I have made small handheld game with an ATMEGA320P, sort of similar to the Gamebuino example theturnipking posted above, but it was nothing more than a little custom Pong clone. I never really thought of it as a console though, I was simply just touching up on my coding and had an extra ATMEGA laying around.