Roger Braunstein's Floopy Drive Breathes New Life Into Casio's Unusual, Sticker-Printing Loopy

Vintage gaming enthusiast Roger Braunstein has a treat for those who still have a Casio Loopy lying around, in the form of a Raspberry Pi RP2040-powered development cartridge designed to unlock the device's capabilities: the Floopy Drive.

"It's a flash cart for the Casio Loopy, a lesser-known game console from the 16-bit era, with an integrated full-color sticker printer," Braunstein explains of his creation. "The Loopy only had a small library of 10 games (plus Magical Shop, a video capture accessory), and some of them are quite rare and hard to access. With the Floopy Drive, you can play any commercial game, plus homebrew!"

The Casio Loopy My Seal Computer SV-100 launched in Japan in 1995 as an early entry in the 32-bit console era, powered by the Hitachi SuperH SH7021 CPU running at 16MHz and with 1MB of memory. Capable of four-channel audio and 512 colors over its NTSC-M video output, the device was not a commercial success — but despite software development ceasing in 1996 and hardware production ending in 1998, the unusual feature of a built-in thermal printer capable of spitting out screenshots as color stickers mean the Loopy still has a place in fans' hearts.

It's for these fans that Braunstein has developed the Floopy Drive. Built around a Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core microcontroller, the Floopy Drive includes 4MB of flash storage — larger than the 3MB required of the largest official Loopy game, to provide room for expansive homebrew development — and 128kB of battery-backed static RAM (SRAM) for saves.

A USB Type-C port allows new games to be written to the cartridge over a simple USB Mass Storage drag-and-drop interface, with a companion software tool automatically backing up saves from the SRAM — meaning that when switching between games nothing is lost. If connected to a PC and the Loopy at the same time, the USB port switches to UART mode — providing bidirectional access to the console's serial port.

Braunstein claims the Floopy Drive is entirely compatible with all ten games released commercially for the Loopy, though that claim comes with with trio of caveats: Wanwan Aijou Monogatari (Doggie Love Story) used a custom sound chip which is not present in the Floopy Drive, meaning there are no sound effects; Magical Shop, which lets the user capture stills from video sources, runs but does nothing unless you have the original Magical Shop video capture hardware; and Lupiton's Wonder Palette's Magical Shop support likewise requires the original hardware.

Braunstein has released the design files and source code for the project on GitHub under the permissive MIT license, and plans to do a small production run in early 2024 at $90 per cartridge — with interested parties invited to sign up for the wait list on his Tindie store.