Bitbox : a small open, DIY 32 bit VGA console

Bitbox : a small open, DIY 32 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 you guys could be interested about my little homemade console. Of course, it's all open & hardware design & software sources are 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 12 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 GPU or any other chip than the microcontroller. Thus, nothing is set in stone, you can tweak anything.

 

What 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 !

- has a simulator to program games on PC (source compatible with API, SDL-based) and then test on device.

 

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