The Upcoming Arduboy FX Lets You Store Hundreds of Games in Flash Memory

Arduboy is a compact handheld video game console that is completely Arduino-compatible. The standard version is only 8-bit and has a black and white OLED screen, so you won’t be purchasing an Arduboy for the graphics. Rather, the appeal of the Arduboy is that it is completely open source and hackable. You can do anything you want with it and there are hundreds of games available for it — many of which were developed by the community. The new Arduboy FX upgrade will be released soon, which will give you the ability to store those hundreds of games in flash memory.

Because Arduboy is open source, you can create your own with a wide range of hardware. But the standard device runs on a Microchip ATmega32U4, which is the same microcontroller found in the Arduino Leonardo and Micro. It only has 32KB of built-in flash memory, so you have to flash new games from your computer whenever you want to play something different. The Arduboy FX upgrade dramatically expands that flash memory and gives you a boot menu to load any of the hundreds of available games whenever you want with no computer needed.

To take advantage of the Arduboy FX upgrade you can either modify a standard Arduboy or purchase a limited number of pre-modified units. Performing the upgrade yourself should only take about 15 minutes. All you have to do is open up the case and solder the Arduboy FX Mod Chip to the test points on the circuit board. Then you can simply flash the new Arduboy FX bootloader and copy over all of the games to the flash memory. Both the Arduboy FX Mod Chip and the pre-modified units are expected to be available for purchase in September, so be sure to sign up for email notifications on the Arduboy website so you know when they’re available.