Bitbox:a small Open, DIY + bit VGA console

Bitbox:a small Open, DIY + bit VGA console

Hi all,

I ' ve been developing a simple DIY console and a participant of the project and of this message board just told me Guys Could is interested about my little homemade console. Of course, it's all open & hardware design & software sources is available (on GitHub).

It ' s a one-chip STM32F4 based console (+ a few passives), which has the following abilities:

-640x480 @ 32768 colors, 60Hz VGA screen output

-1M Flash, 192 kB RAM (yes, kilo)

-Stereo sound (8 or bits, usually 12)

-Micro SD Card reader

-2 USB hosts, compatible with mice, keyboards and USB gamepads

-Expansion port for. Whatever (I²c, SPI, UART, GPIO)

-USB device for power or maybe bootloader upgrades.

Everything is generated by software "racing the beam", i.e. no specialized GPUs or any other chip than the microcontroller. Thus, nothing was set in stone, and you can tweak anything.

What's it is capable of:

-Full graphical bootloader operated by gamepads (ability to select and flash games from MICRO-SD)

-Play videos (special format, see blog post) from the SD card

-Play. mod files (from SD card, larger than memory)

-Run a Gameboy emulator! (based on Gnuboy)-I should port other emulators maybe spectrum, NES?

-run some native games-still not enough, always doing some more

-... more to come!

-Have a simulator to program in PC (source compatible with API, sdl-based) and then test on device.

More info at:http://bitboxconsole.blogspot.com/

Bitbox:a small Open, DIY + bit VGA console