Technology continues to get ever more powerful and ever smaller, but sometimes the ingenuity of the modding community serves up a project that beggars belief. This is one of those occasions. Allow us to introduce you to the VMU-boy, a RetroPie powered console inside a VMU shell with the ability to play a host of retro roms on a tiny LCD screen. You thought the Gameboy Micro was small? Wait till you get a load of this! The result of some stellar work by Giles Burgess (aka Kite), the VMU-boy is truly a wondrous accomplishment and as the images and video show, the contraption fits easily in the palm of a hand. Whether it's actually practical to play games on a device so small for any length of time without causing long term damage to eyes and hands remains to be seen, but 10 out of 10 must be awarded for effort. The specs and features of the device are fairly impressive too, as detailed in the forum post over at sudomod: Pi Zero/W 128x128 SPI LCD Main PCB with direct Pi soldering 850mAh battery (4 hrs or more gameplay!). If I could find a slightly wider battery it might even make it to 900/1000mAh!) Safe shutdown! Micro USB charging which doubles as USB OTG port (plug in a USB OTG adapter and it will power the USB device and connect it to the Pi) Power switch and status LEDs Battery voltage monitoring + charging status Built in speaker amp 'Basic' OSD (need to work on this more, whipped it up very quickly!) GPIO buttons built into the PCB All inputs available under the 'cap' at the top, including the Pi SD card so it's really easy to work on Internal serial port available as a JST header (made it very easy to see my Pi was working after I had removed the HDMI port!) Battery connectors (1mm JST) or solder pads. Extra pads allow putting 2x batteries in parrallel (e.g. if you have 2x small batts that will fit) Interestingly, Kite's post suggests he will be offering the VMU-boy for sale at some point in 2018, and a link to a waiting list has already been added to the post. http://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2017/11/introducing-vmu-boy-retropie-powered.html
love it, would be so sick to see in a clear case, maybe with the on the go lanyard on the bottom attached.
Hot dayum, I should get to work on one of these ASAP. It would be cool to USB mod a Dreamcast controller, and have this Pi-Zero VMU slot into it and display things when you're emulating DC games.
Very cool. I always thought that the VMUs were pretty ahead of their time. Any time I show them to people that didn't experience the Dreamcast they're pretty taken aback by it.
i could see this coupled to the dreamcast, what signals can the maple bus correlate to the controller interface to the mainboard, could on the fly data like bus speed and processor temp be relayed?
Pretty neat setup. I'm working on something kind of similar in shoving a pi0 into one of these. http://www.ausretrogamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/NAMCO_arcade_collection.png
Gotta hand it to them for ingenuity, but I can't imagine playing games like that for any extended period of time. Would be a pretty cool way to netboot games to a Naomi system too.
