So I'm new to this electronics thing and I have a few questions. I want to create a simple game using a 7-Segment Display and two tactile switches. I've already made the game and it works, but I now want the game to work without a mess of 11 different wires connected to my Arduino board 4 inches away. So, I did a bit of research and found out I could control the game using a standalone ATMega 328 chip. According to this
[http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoToBreadboard
I can setup an ATMega chip without using extra capacitors and a 16 MHz crystal by relying on a the ATMega328's internal 8MHz crystal. I'm wondering if there are any drawbacks to this setup, and if so, how will they affect my game? I want to keep my project as simple as possible, but I still want it to be fully functional.
It doesn't have an internal crystal.
It does have two internal RC oscillators, an 128kHz one and an 8MHz one. Neither is stable enough(*) to guarantee that serial programming via a bootloader will work. You would need to an ICSP programmer to upload sketches I believe.
Ceramic resonators are accurate enough for serial programming and have inbuilt load capacitors so they can be used instead of a crystal and its caps - a good compromise perhaps.
(*) supply voltage and temperature variations will change the frequency.