PICO Gamer: Transforming a Microcontroller into a Games Console

Hey guys, did you know I had a second TikTok channel? Well, I do. It’s called the CK Enthusiast. It stands for Computer Knowledge Enthusiast and it’s where I really focus on tech development. On that channel I develop this board. This is the PICO Gamer. The idea is to take this very popular microcontroller and turn it into a games console. As you can see, I’ve added HDMI and I’ve added an audio Jack. Well you might ask the question, why does the HDMI not have audio running through it? Well, technically this is using DVI, not HDMI. HDMI is backwards compatible with it, but it doesn’t have an audio signal. This is a limitation of the hardware I’m working on. And it’s something I’m of course working on. But for now I can be really brave like apple and reintroduce the three and a half inch Jack which plugs into these handy headphones. Now because I’m working with firmware directly, the boot up procedure for this is incredibly quick. I power it on and it basically loads. Is that quick? This is an audio test program that will call the piano game. So if I press A here, I will then be able to play some notes on my 6 button pad. Just for fun I added in a record feature. So if I press the two top buttons at the top it will then go into recording mode and then I can just go and stop recording Then, of course, I have a playback mode by pressing these two buttons. So there we go. It does actually work, and it’s a very simple example of audio. Now, of course, this is a gaming system, so without any games it’s pretty useless. So I’ve just flashed a new firmware to this. I’ll press the button, you get that very simple tune going. And this is basically a version of pong. It’s a good first game to start off with. I find the bouncing colour balls fun and so does the cat. Plus it’s a game I can demonstrate while using one hand and recording a video. So as you can see, you can hear the beeps as it bounces around. And it’s basically a version of pong. The only difference is I can actually attack with bullets. So if I fire a bullet there and it hits the other player, it will actually pause them for 3 seconds, giving it a little bit more strategy to the game. And while this might not be as impressive as Halo, it does at least play. And it’s a good first programming attempt, demonstrating that this board can produce graphics and audio, and all with just 2 megabytes of storage and 264 kilobytes of RAM. So think of this as a modern SNES.