The Tiniest, Minimalist-Oriented Handheld Game Console Accepts Adorable Little Cartridges

2005’s Nintendo Game Boy Micro was a really neat handheld video game console, but I think we can all agree that it had one major flaw: too big. What if we could go smaller? What if we could go absolutely tiny? Of course, we wouldn’t want to lose the characteristics that make gaming fun, like pixels, buttons, and sounds. Now we can have it all, thanks to the EMES (Epic Minimalist Entertainment System) designed by Michael — and it even takes adorable little cartridges.

Michael’s goal was to design a handheld video game console with all of the features we would expect, but on a small scale and at the lowest cost possible. EMES is the result and it is charming as heck. The entire “console” is a PCB about an inch square. It has four buttons, an itty-bitty micro-LED display, a buzzer, and a cartridge system. Michael has even programmed two AAA games for the EMES: Pong and Snake.

The development started with selecting the hardware that would handle processing. Michael chose a Microchip ATtiny10 microcontroller for the job, because it is very inexpensive, even in small quantities. It also has enough capability to do the job. There are cheaper microcontrollers out there (especially if purchased in large quantities), but the ATtiny10 has the right combination of price, availability, and usability.

Taking a page from the playback of the Milton Bradley Microvision (the first handheld game console to use cartridges), Michael gave each cartridge its own ATtiny10 microcontroller. That eliminates the need for a dedicated ROM chip on each cartridge and also removes the complication (and overhead) required for the microcontroller to access an external ROM. So, the “console” contains the user interface hardware, while the cartridges contain microcontrollers that store and run the game code. The ATtiny10 doesn’t have many pins available, which forced Michael to get clever about implementation. For example, one PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation) pin controls both the display brightness and the buzzer.

That display might just be the most unique component used in this project. It is a vintage Plessey GPD340 micro-LED display. We previously covered some of Michael’s work reverse engineering that display and his efforts paid off here. The GPD340 was designed to display two characters and so it has two 5×7 matrices of LEDs. The games display their graphics across those two matrices, yielding a whopping total of 70 pixels.

You can probably imagine playing Pong on this display, but Snake would definitely be tricky. Either way, it is better than dealing with the massive bulk of the Game Boy Micro.