u/FewInsurance2163

Sorry you have to see this guys but as a consequence of the state of the world, your community is growing.

Here’s my “whatever you have on hand” setup. It’s not fancy, but it works.

Now for the hardware:

I rescued a previously enslaver of men corporate accolade machine (aka office pc) Dell 5060.

A 2TB LaCie enclosure from the times when the internet was populated by humans.

5 year old ISP provided router.

The cheapest Ubiquity AP I could afford.

Repaired UPS I received in exchange of fixing my in laws computer.

Ikea shelf that never in its life imagined it would get this current job (and an orange bucket that put “cable management” in its resume)

And that’s it, I can’t help to feel I’ve somehow stumbled into yet another one of those rabbit holes…

This is the jankiest device I’ve ever built. But it works and has mechanical switches for buttons, so, here ya go.

Based on ESP32 S3, and put together with whatever parts I had in a drawer.

Now, I’d like your help with it.
How do I improve the alignment on the keys?
And how do I even start to design a 3D printed case for this?

So this beautiful and professionally crafted device is a gaming console dev kit.

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Hardware specs:

ESP32-S3

2.4 Inch TFT LCD Display Screen Module Drive ILI9341 Interface SPI 240*320

Protoboards x4
Tiny cables x A bunch
Cherry MX Gateron Brown x8
Random PBT keycaps x8
K&F Concept 67mm ND Filter Box x1

Tools:

Cheap solder iron
Whatever soldering wire
Smelly resin
20$ Multimeter

ChatGPT
Wishful thinking
This community’s faith
My wife’s patience

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Planning to use it to learn game dev. Probably put together some sort of runtime that can load “cartridges” from SD card, and maybe some of you can jump in and develop whatever this is, I just wanna play pixelated games on the cheap haha

I’ll comment some pics below so you see part of the process.

I set myself to build a game machine to develop my own games (and maybe open source a runtime) for esp32. Not an emulator but actual games for the hardware.

All this with my 2% knowledge in programming and electronics.

Am I way over my head with this? Yes
Does it force me to learn? Also yes

UPDATE: I might have hyper fixated today…

Just passed by to thank you for your advice and good vibes. AAAND to show you the alpha version of the device. I’ve left a picture below and if you’d like I can share a post with the whole process.
(I can’t add more images to the original post, right? Help a 38 yo senior citizen)

So, a short disclaimer, I have very basic knowledge on how programming and electronics work, and find myself starting to experiment with the ESP32 platform, so if im out of line or just in the wrong sub, please let me know.

Long story short, cant we build something like a game development platform to build games for the esp32 as if it was a gameboy? Ive seen people developing roms for the original gameboy so I thought; why don’t we just USE the esp32 hardware instead of emulating a different system? It’s quite capable, just not enough for emulation.
In my mind, this could turn into an open project that anyone can build for, no profit intended, just a sandbox for creating games.

Please reality check me on this, is my ignorance betraying me, or is this something that can be done?

P.D. This is kind of a mock up polished with AI