Retropotenza

I was recently looking around on eBay, trying to find a Game Boy Advance copy of  Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past The first one that I bought had a strange looking label... so I decided to open it up and investigate a bit more. Once opened, it was evident that the  PCB  was indeed hosting a  flash  chip, even with pads to attach a programmer to it. On the left, a fake cart, on the right the original one. An original cart contains instead a  mask ROM , and a smaller  EEPROM  to store games saves (see the above picture). The issue of fake carts is that they store the game and its saves on the same  flash  chip, and that this kind of chip wears out much more quickly that an  EEPROM : you may lose all your progresses at any save 😱. I sent a complain to the eBay seller. He promptly refund the fake cart, without any further question, leaving it to me at the end.

Last summer I've started to work with few friends at some cool arcade retrogaming projects, all based on Raspberry Pi and Retropie. We started looking around for needed hardware: arcade controls, interface boards, and of course chassis options. I was willing to come up with something different from a traditional upright cabinet, or from a more manageable bartop. I wanted real arcade controls, but at the same time full portability. A device that could be hooked at an external screen, like old consoles, but at the time time equipped  with an internal screen, speakers, and a rechargeable battery to power everything up. The  Nintendo Switch  was not yet announced, anyways it doesn't count since I envisioned portability for two players, but with real arcade controls. I sketched up some concepts, and started to try few CAD modelling tools. I've found one that was extremely powerful, easy to use and at that time free for small projects:  Onshape . I've worked at this project i