Daniel C’s Arduino Video Game Collection Ported to the Raspberry Pi Pico
Daniel C has developed many Arduino games, and Roger Rabbit ported those to the Raspberry Pi Pico and designed a console to play them.
While it will never compare to the homebrew video game explosion that came with the popularity of home computers, microcontrollers have allowed a niche community of video game developers to spring up in recent years. The Arduboy is a small Arduino-compatible handheld video game console similar to the original Nintendo Game Boy. As with every other console in history, its success has been heavily dependent on the games available. Daniel C is responsible for creating many of those Arduino-compatible games, and now Roger Rabbit has ported those to the Raspberry Pi Pico and designed a console to play them.
Daniel C programmed a variety of video games, many of them clones of popular retro games, which can run on Arduino development boards, the Arduboy, and his own Tinyjoypad console. The new Raspberry Pi Pico is a microcontroller development board similar to Arduinos, but it isn’t officially supported by the Arduino IDE at this time. That means that you can’t simply flash Daniel C’s games like you would with the Arduboy or another Arduino-based console. Fortunately, the community has been hard at work getting the Raspberry Pi Pico functioning with the Arduino IDE as a Band-Aid until official support is added. Roger Rabbit took advantage of Earle F. Philhower’s Arduino-Pico project to successfully port Daniel C’s game collection.
He doesn’t provide much detail about the hardware, but Roger Rabbit did build a handheld based on the Raspberry Pi Pico to play those games. That contains the Pico itself with its powerful RP2040 microcontroller, a 2.42” SSD1309 OLED display connected via SPI, a small 400mAh LiPo battery connected through a charging board, a piezo speaker, and six control buttons. Those components are simply sandwiched between two acrylic plates. Roger Rabbit reports that there are still some compatibility issues with the Raspberry Pi Pico, namely the refresh rate. He has had framerates as low as 20 FPS. Even so, this proves that it is possible to run Arduino games on the Raspberry Pi Pico and that should help fuel further development.