32blit Retro-inspired Homebrew Handheld with Open-source Firmware

[alxm]

Good luck with the project, it's nice to see a resurgence of homebrew handhelds! Arduboy and Gamebuino really demonstrate you can achieve more than imagined with microcontrollers, and it really encourages new original software instead of generic ports. The Cortex-M7 you're using seems like a beast in comparison though, and hardware FP too... Today's microcontrollers start to look like last decade's full-fledged systems (bar RAM)

By the way, since you stream instructions from SPI flash instead of burn a whole program to the chip's memory, does it mean that switching between different games is more or less instantaneous?

Also, it's cool to hear that the 32blit was in a way inspired by the GP2X & co, this scene has been influential for a lot of people.

 

[gadgetoid]

Thank you! I still remember the GP2X fondly although I sold mine years and years and years ago mostly due to it gobbling AA batteries faster than I could supply them!

I really hope 32blit captures the same lightning in a bottle communities like this have found. While it’s super awesome to l build something like this, I’m most excited to see what some of the godly skilled programmers out here manage to squeeze out of it.

Over the last few days I’ve been doing a weird complementary mix of writing blog posts and enhancing our tooling- silly but useful things like built-in video capture for Windows/Linux targets and better make based tooling for starting/testing projects.

 

[gadgetoid]

The STM32 part we're using has been tested and approved at 480MHz, a 20% overclock from the original 400MHz clock speed. This predictably has pretty much direct translation to framerate improvement (since it's mostly CPU bound as there's no GPU).

 

[JDTAY]

@ClockworkCoder says he just got his 32blit. He's waiting until tonight to open it though, so he can concentrate on work.

@gadgetoid Good to see you actually shipped in the Year Not of Our Lord 2020.