Eli Lipsitz's Game Bub Is a Slick FPGA-Driven Handheld for Nintendo Game Boy Nostalgics
This open source hardware project lets you play Nintendo Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games in style.
Maker and retro-computing enthusiast Eli Lipsitz is preparing to launch an open source alternative to the Analogue Pocket FPGA-driven handheld console emulator, albeit one only supporting Nintendo's classic Game Boy games: the Game Bub.
"Game Bub is an open-source FPGA-based retro emulation handheld that supports Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games," Lipsitz explains. "Game Bub is the first fully open-source FPGA retro-emulation handheld. Game Bub plays your collection of physical Game Boy and Game Boy Advance cartridges, and you can also enjoy the thriving Game Boy homebrew and romhack scene by loading ROMs you own from a microSD card — no flashcart needed. Game Bub also includes built-in cartridge backup and restore functionality: never lose a save file again!"
The idea behind the handheld is the same as that behind the commercial Analogue Pocket: a portable retro gaming device that uses soft-cores loaded into an on-board FPGA rather than software emulation, with support for loading games from original cartridges. Where the Analogue Pocket has, very deliberately, no support for loading games from ROM dumps on mass storage, though, the Game Bub will do so happily — though with the trade-off that the Analogue Pocket is multi-system capable, while the Game Bub only supports three generations of Nintendo's handhelds.
The Nintendo Game Boy-style Game Bub is built around an AMD Artix 7 field-programmable gate array, giving it 101,400 logic cells and 607.5kB of block RAM, expanded with 32MB of SDRAM and 512kB of static RAM (SRAM), with an Espressif ESP32-S3 providing support for "auxiliary tasks" including single-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity. There's a 3.5" 480×320 full-color IPS display above a four-way direction pad and other input buttons, while a docking provides two USB ports for external controllers and an HDMI output for bit-screen gaming.
Lipsitz has released the design files and source code for the project on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and GNU General Public License 3 respectively; he is also planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the gadget on Crowd Supply in the near future, at an as-yet unconfirmed price point.