Self made Gaming Console

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.

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.