Hi everyone, I have been playing around with arduino for a while now and wanted to tackle a challenge, making an arduino game. It would look like a Nintendo DSi with the hinges but only one screen on the to half, 10 mushy tact switches for, Up, Down, Left, Right, Pause/Play, 1, 2, plus and minus for volume.
ok. what will go into the rest of the "system"? screen size? battery? battery charger? etc.
Start writing things down, define more of it.
There is a game console out there called the UzeBox that is based on the ATmega644... http://belogic.com/uzebox/index.asp
A handheld hack of that system (probably very heavy use of surface-mount variants of chips, etc) would be awesome IMO!
Maybe step it up to the ATmega1284 for more space & bigger games.
I was thinking of using either a camcorder or 4 as battery's, the screen size I will make 3.5" and casing I will either use stereo lithography or a laser engraver. As for programming I hope to make theme to sell so I would make a few basic games etc. Pacman or Pong and make it open source so people could make and share their own games, I would use two tiny speakers and headphone jack possibly. I would program a basic interface.
Take a look at this made by 4D Systems:
I'm a fan of AA cells, well, Eneloops really. I much prefer them in handheld devices over proprietary fitted Li-ion cells. So to that end, I encourage the use of AA sized cells. 3 AA NiMH cells in series have similar voltage characteristics to 1 Li-ion cell. Quality NiMH rechargeable AA cells are 2000mAh to 2500mAh in capacity these days. You should have a low voltage cut off at about 1.0V to 1.1V per cell when using NiMH cells in series.
Some old-school dungeon crawl RPG type games would be fun (Wizardry comes to mind), and don't need to be too resource heavy.
Running a program/game in an emulator on a computer and being able to easily copy it back and forth and save progress would be cool too. Using USB communication would work well, and/or SD cards for on the go program/game storage. You could also possibly use the handheld game system as the controller for games when they're run on the computer too. If using rechargeable batteries, you could potentially have it charge them through the USB cable.
Just some food for thought, if you're hungry.
Yeah, one of the old mainframe kind of games - "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"
hi all will post designs later