Phil Nelson's Silius is a Compact Portable PC Built From an Orange Pi Zero 2W

Maker Phil Nelson has designed a compact portable computer for on-the-go productivity — powered by an Orange Pi Zero 2W single-board computer and named for a run-and-gun side-scroller released on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1990.

"I designed a little Debian [Linux]-based cyberdeck this month for funsies," Nelson explains of his creation. "I kept being annoyed by my phone and tablet, I just wanted a computer! So I made one I could bring in my bag. It is named Silius after the NES game Journey to Silius (aka Rough World in Japan)."

Journey to Silius, released by Sunsoft in 1990 and originally developed as a game-of-the-film tie-in to Terminator before a disagreement on licensing saw the rights go to another developer, sees the player character Kay McCray attempting to avenge his father's death at the hands of a terrorist group responsible for the destruction of a colony in the Silius Solar System. None of this, however, has anything to do with Nelson's Silius — which is neither a solar system nor a space colony.

Silius is, rather, a compact portable computer that puts an Orange Pi Zero 2W in a 3D-printed case behind a full-color display. Designed to mimic the form factor of the better-known Raspberry Pi Zero family, the Orange Pi Zero 2W launched a year ago as an Allwinner H618-based single-board computer delivering four Arm Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 1.5GHz, an Arm Mali G31-MP2 graphics processor, and up to 4GB of RAM. A single 18650 lithium-ion powers both the SBC and the display, getting around two hours per charge.

"[It] plays YouTube and Plex and RetroStrange TV just great," Nelson says of the performance — with more information available from his Mastodon post.