Hi everyone,

I always was a huge fan of handheld game consoles like the PSP, 3DS, PS Vita and so on and made it my hobby to build my own retro handheld game console from the hardware parts to the software. After many attempts, improvements and an endless list of things I learned I finally reached a point at which I want to hear what others think about it.

Hardware

Hardware-wise I made a whole custom board for the raspberry pi zero (and zero 2) which includes the following features:

• a Display port using SPI (320x240 60FPS)

• Battery charger module using USB-C with LED indicators

• battery measuring of state-of-charge

• a flat battery with 2000mah which lasts over 6 hours

• Sound chip for the speaker

• headphone jack

• a hardware clock which proceeds after the whole system is turned off

• 16 unique 3D-printed Buttons; one which could be used as a shortcut button for sound/display

• a voltage booster to give 5V to the Pi constantly

• A 3D-printed Case

• made SD card, USB and HDMI plugs available from outside the case

• the pi is plugged to the board without any soldering

• everything is made to be put together without any screws/soldering

What are you buying?

Includes

• Custom PCB
• 3D-printed Buttons *
• 3D-printed Case *
• Display 3.2"
• Battery

*Please consider that 3D-printing may have variations in the quality of the cases and buttons.

Every package is checked before for full functionality to make sure all buttons, sound, display etc. work as they should.

DOES NOT INCLUDE

• Raspberry Pi Zero (With soldered header for connection)
• SD Card
• charging cable

Software

As I am also a software-guy I developed my own launcher and a customized raspbian to support every part of my handheld out-of-the-box. It is still in development but currently I have the following things implemented:

• extremely lightweight (2MB Ram) launcher using LVGL as a lib

• a key mapper which can be used to adapt the button layout to the game

• made godot a first-class citizen by using frt (https://github.com/efornara/frt) and using a game which I developed myself as a reference

• A settings menu to customize your launcher, connect wifi and many other things which are WIP

• showing the launcher after pressing the home button - pausing currently running games

• bypassing x11/wayland with SDL2 as a renderer using dispman (which currently gives best performance)

• optimized raspbian to improve boot-times

You can download an ISO from github here where you can also see how I made the ISO and get some further information. Everything is open-source. :)

Games

You can get some games from github here. See the readme for details and download the games from the releases section.

There is also an explanation on how to make your own games. :)

Media

You can find more details, videos and screenshots on my mastodon.social account here.