Dan Julio Pops Arcade Classic Galaga on His Desk — Powered by His Custom Espressif ESP32 Dev Board
The high-end gCore development board gets put to good use powering a 3D-printed arcade-perfect port of Midway's Galaga.
Electrical engineer Dan Julio has built a miniature desktop arcade cabinet, playing a mean game of Galaga — and powered by his custom high-end Espressif ESP32 development board, the gCore.
"gCore — short for Gadget Core — is a high-performance ESP32 development board I designed for my open source tCam thermal imaging camera and to be a platform for other portable devices," Julio explains of the board at the heart of the project. "It has the features and performance I found missing on other dev boards. If you've ever found yourself kludging a bunch of breakout boards together or wishing for things like better graphics performance or soft power control then gCore is for you."
To prove that, Julio has been using the gCore platform for a range of projects, including an arcade-perfect port of Midway's shoot-'em-up classic Galaga. "[It's] a fork of Till Harbaum's awesome Galaga emulator ported to gCore," Julio explains. "It runs really well. I used OpenSCAD to make a basic enclosure for my build."
Calling the housing a "basic enclosure" is perhaps selling the project a little short: what Julio has designed is a miniature upright arcade cabinet, which places the gCore front-and-center to show off its full-color 3.5" 480×320 display — rotated vertically to suit the game and match the layout of the original arcade cabinet. There's no joystick, but five tactile push-button switches for horizontal ship control, fire, coin input, and game start.
"The design also includes support for a bit of extra hardware," Julio notes. "[A] bulkhead USB-C connector connector connected to gCore's +5/GND inputs; bulkhead power button connected to gCore's SW/GND inputs; bulkhead slide switch connected in series with the audio amp SW V+ to allow turning off the sound."
The project is documented in full in Julio's GitHub repository, which includes the source code and STL files for printing the enclosure; design files and source code for the gCore itself are in a separate repository under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3, while assembled boards are available for purchase on Tindie at $99.95 — not including the Galaga arcade cabinet.