Tetris Game Runs in an NES Controller

If you grew up in the 1980s or early '90s, there’s a very good chance you spent hours and hours playing Tetris on the original Game Boy. The game’s popularity was certainly due in a large part to it being included with the system, but its simple block-based play was perfect for its small black-and-white (or “greenscale”) screen. Now, several decades later, hacker “Copper Dragon” has been able to fit a very similar version of this game into an NES lookalike controller using an Arduino Nano clone.

If you’ve seen other “game stuffing” hacks here, you might note that Pi-based hardware, like the Pi Zero W is normally used to run such rigs. That apparently wasn’t enough of a challenge for Dragon, who instead enlisted the Nano with its limited processing power and memory. These limitations were taken care of by programming the most critical part of the program — video generation — in AVR assembly code. Also, the fact that it only runs Tetris, and not Sonic, Mario, Golden Axe, and other games was certainly helpful.

The game not only produces black-and-white video, but produces audio as well. These signals were generated charging a capacitor to reach the needed target voltages, acting as a DAC. As seen in the video above, it’s quite a good imitation. The flicker is due to the recording phone’s camera; in real life the image is quite stable.