It will come as no surprise to our readers that we are fans of tiny screens, and games played on them – from the Cupcade to this MAME cabinet. Pi0CKET-tiny joins the ranks as “possibly the worlds smallest Pi based gaming device.” You can’t even call a device like this ‘handheld’ – it’s barely ‘fingerheld’ by the looks of it! I mean, it’s tiny:
Here’s a classic Game Boy screen for size-comparison:
And of course to rival the classic ‘Boy device Hackaday.io user [moosepr] went ahead and designed a wee-chasis for all the components to snug away inside.
All the STL files and a lot more info and photos are available here on the project page.
So as you may know, I have a bit of an obsession for making things as small as i can. Now my last project was pretty small, the height was restricted by the height of the Pi zero, and the width was restricted by the width of the screen.
Now this works well, but it wasnt without its limitations. Firstly the controls were not perfect. using a 5 way navigation switch for the actions works, but it is not ideal, especially when you need to press more than one button at once.
So I decided to move to buttons, and while i was at it, try and reduce some of the excess bulk to the device.
while trawling the internet i cam across Pico-8 which is a goldmine of retro games and fun. One of the limitations of Pico-8 is the screen size of 128×128 pixels. this conveniently matched some 1.44″ screens i have found while trawling the internet and the rest, as they say, was history!
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