Who Needs a $900 Console? Build This Cool Retro Machine Instead

Back in the early days of video games, we had everything we needed. We had action games, fantasy games, Mario, and Sonic — what more could you ask for? One thing we didn’t have was $900 consoles. The hardware in these early machines may have been modest, but coding in assembly language helped developers squeeze the most out of them.

YouTuber Inkbox wanted to bring back the experience of playing classic game consoles, so he built his own. It’s powered by modest hardware, but that’s no problem because the cartridge-based games run on bare metal. The hardware is packed into an odd dodecahedral case that only a hardware hacker could love, but the more you look at it, the more it grows on you.

The project is built around a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B — hardly cutting-edge hardware in 2026, but more than capable when freed from the overhead of a full operating system. Instead of booting into Linux, the console directly runs custom Arm assembly code stored on interchangeable cartridges. As a result, the machine powers on almost instantly, just like classic consoles from the 1980s and 1990s.

To make the cartridges work, Inkbox designed a PCB that reroutes the Raspberry Pi’s microSD card interface into a chunky 40-pin cartridge connector mounted on the top of the console. Each cartridge contains a custom PCB and an SD card loaded with boot files and the game software.

Instead of 3D printing a single giant enclosure, Inkbox designed the system as a collection of interlocking pentagonal panels. Different faces serve different purposes: one holds a 4.3-inch Waveshare display, others contain the arcade-style controls and speakers, while the top face houses the cartridge slot. The parts were resin printed on a Formlabs Form 4 SLA printer, giving the finished device a highly polished appearance.

In total, the console uses 12 arcade buttons wired through hardware debouncing circuits built from resistors, capacitors, and 74HC14D Schmitt trigger chips. That hardware filtering ensures every button press is delivered to the Raspberry Pi as a perfectly clean digital signal without jitter or bouncing.

The custom assembly code initializes only a single CPU core while placing the remaining three cores into sleep mode. It configures GPIO registers manually for controller input, communicates directly with the GPU to establish a frame buffer, and taps into the Pi’s hardware random number generator for use during gameplay.

So far, Inkbox has a bare metal implementation of Pac-Man working on the console. There are also a number of emulators running via RetroPie if you get tired of chomping Power Pellets. It would be a pretty complex build to reproduce, but in any case, the video is well worth a watch.