Creating a retro gamebox with Arduino

Darren Yates of APC Mag has designed an Arduino-based retro gamebox for those of us who are nostalgic for blocky graphics, tinny 8-bit sound, stacks of (dusty) cartridges and golden memories.

To complete this project, you’ll need a number of basic components, including an Atmel-powered Arduino Uno R3, 8-way arcade joystick, arcade pushbutton, Dupont wires, red RCA socket, black RCA socket, 900ml kitchen food container, 2 x 470ohm 0.5W metal resistor and a 1 x 1kohm 0.5W metal resistor.

“The inspiration for this project of ours came from the Hackvision system developed by Nootropic Design. It’s a basic cut-down custom Arduino with four direction buttons and a fire button, all built onto a single printed circuit board,” Yates explained.

“You can buy it as a prebuilt device ($44) or a kit you put together yourself ($34). However, since the Arduino code for a number of games — including Space Invaders, Asteroid, Tetris and Sudoku — has been released to open source, we decided a game box with existing Arduino hardware would be a worthy inclusion into our project list. [Plus], by using a standard Arduino in our Retro Gamebox, changing games is as simple as plugging the Gamebox into your PC’s USB port and compiling the new Arduino sketch.”

Interested? You can find original games at nootropicdesign.com/hackvision/. To make it easier, APC has put together each game as a separate ZIP pack, with all the required libraries included. These can be downloaded from apcmag.com/arduino.htm under Project 07. Additional information, along with a full list of instructions for building the Retro Gamebox, is available here on the APC Mag site.