RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch

flopsamjetsam•about 17 hours ago

From the GitHub page:

> It is a Gameboy Advance from a parallel universe where RISC-V existed in 2001. A love letter to the handheld consoles from my childhood, and a 3AM drunk text to the technology that powered them.

jihadjihad•about 15 hours ago

Thank you to the author for writing a GitHub page in 2026 that is entirely devoid of emoji.

LukeShu•about 14 hours ago

I mean no disrespect to Luke Wren, but he did not write it in 2026; he wrote it in 2018-2021. :)

tough•about 15 hours ago

on the other hand having emoji on the readme is a great signal of llm-slop on my radar

jstanley•about 8 hours ago

Isn't that the same hand?

bananaboy•about 15 hours ago

Oh this is Luke Wren’s work. He’s an ASIC design engineer at Raspberry Pi. Amazing project, I love it!

LukeShu•about 14 hours ago

I think "ASIC design" engineer is under-selling him--he's working on their CPU cores too!

bananaboy•about 13 hours ago

Haha yeah I just went by his LinkedIn title

sehugg•about 6 hours ago

The programmable scanline-buffer-based rendering pipeline described in the PDF is worth a read for fans of such things.

mithro•about 7 hours ago

The design was taped out on the first wafer.space run (see https://github.com/wafer-space/ws-run1) but I have not heard if it actually worked or not.

wewewedxfgdf•about 15 hours ago

This guy also designed DVI/HDMI from RP2040:

https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI

LukeShu•about 14 hours ago

He works at Raspberry Pi, and designed the Hazard3 RISC-V core that is at the heart of the RP2350--although he did Hazard3 in his spare time. It's actually a fork of the "Hazard5" core that he designed for the RISCBoy.

haebom•about 2 hours ago

Is the greatest challenge in adopting this new hardware architecture the technology itself, or the lack of an existing developer ecosystem and software toolchains?

joshu•about 16 hours ago

i love the "hardware from an alternate universe" projects.

LukeShu•about 14 hours ago

I'm surprised to see that it's OK that he has opensource AHB/APB stuff in it--I'd avoided learning them too much about them assuming that they were ARM proprietary.

bri3d•about 14 hours ago

AMBA has been an open standard for a really long time, I think maybe since it was released?

iFire•about 17 hours ago

Does RISCBoy run Godot Engine? How can I make RISCBoy run Godot Engine?

makapuf•about 2 hours ago

Its not a computer, its a small device. You dont have many unknown peripheral you dont have other programs. The memory and peripherals are there, just use them. Heap is complicated ? Preallocate everything. A peripheral is not used ? Just leave it there. Security ? Of what ? Thats the appeal of those devices.

ZiiS•about 7 hours ago

This is a much smaller device then anyone has ever exported Godot to.

More practical would be to port https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020 so that https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio could support it.

bananaboy•about 15 hours ago

If you set up the RISCBoy toolchain and port it then yeah.

wren6991•about 2 hours ago

Why do you want an engine? Just write games

Narishma•about 16 hours ago

No. You can't.

emilfihlman•about 15 hours ago

I'm quite willing to bet it can be done in this era of enabling developers with slob, which still usually works.

Narishma•about 15 hours ago

How can you fit Godot into 512KB of RAM? And with no GPU?

RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch

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