Peter Khouly's Pico Pal Is a Raspberry Pi RP2350B-Powered Retro Gaming and All-Purpose Powerhouse

Maker and vintage computing enthusiast Peter Khouly has designed a homage to Nintendo's classic Game Boy family of handheld consoles, powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2350B and with retro gaming in mind — though equally at home as a general-purpose all-in-one development board: the Pico Pal.

"Although Pico Pal has a retro design, it’s built to be forward-looking," Khouly says of his creation. "Whether you're a hacker, developer, or creative tinkerer, Pico Pal is a versatile platform for a wide range of uses. Of course, its backlit display and classic D-pad make it great for some retro emulation on the go, but its array of I/O [Inputs/Outputs] and powerful microcontrollers can let you use it as a universal remote control, pedometer, or even a portable music player. Of course, it's great for security pentesting — spoof Bluetooth or USB HID inputs, run keystroke and Wi-Fi deauth attacks, with a device that's stealthy and unassuming. Finally, Pico Pal is a versatile devkit for the Raspberry Pi RP2350. Its excellent selection of ports and SPI/I2C compatibility make it a great battery-powered testbed for real-world uses."

The Game Boy-styled Pico Pal is built around Raspberry Pi's latest RP2350B microcontroller, giving it two Arm Cortex-M33 cores and two free and open source Hazard3 RISC-V cores all running at 150MHz, of which the user can pick any two cores to be running at once, plus 520kB of static (SRAM). To this, Khouly has added 16MB of flash storage plus a secondary network controller: an Espressif ESP32, providing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity along with 4MB of its own dedicated flash.

Everything is housed in a transparent handheld case, which includes two fire buttons, a directional pad, plus start and select buttons, located beneath a 2.6" square-format 320×320 resolution full-color IPS display. There's a USB Type-C connector for programming and to charge a 1,500mAh battery, support for HDMI-compatible DVI video output with a USB dock, an infrared transceiver, real-time clock (RTC), stereo speakers with headphone output, and microSD card storage with a bundled 16GB card — plus, for those looking to add a little motion into their projects, an STMicroelectronics LSM6DSO32 inertial measurement unit (IMU).

Naturally, a big focus of the project is on retro gaming — including the ability to emulate Nintendo's Game Boy family of consoles — but Khouly is also positioning the platform as ideal for general-purpose Raspberry Pi RP2350 development. To further that, the schematics, a full bill of materials, and firmware source code have all been published under an unspecified open-source license.

Khouly is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the Pico Pal in the near future, with interested parties invited to sign up on Crowd Supply to be notified when the campaign goes live; links to the schematics and source code are available on the campaign page.