The Retro ESP32 Upgrades Your Game Boy Pocket to a Powerful Retro Gaming Emulation Station
Featuring a battery hidden in a game cartridge and compatibility with a wide range of systems, the Retro ESP32 is a neat upgrade.
Toronto-based All Things Game Boy Pocket is living up to its name with the launch of a drop-in replacement PCB for Nintendo's classic portable games console — powered by an ESP32-WROVER and capable of emulating a range of retro games systems.
The Retro ESP32 board comes as a successor to the Gaboze Pocaio, a popular drop-in board replacement for the Game Boy Pocket with a mounting header on the rear for a Raspberry Pi Zero as the driving brains. The Retro ESP32, by contrast, is a self-contained device, powered by an Espressif ESP32-WROVER module linked to a 2.6" color TFT display.
The board is designed primarily for use with original Nintendo Game Boy Pocket casing whose insides have failed and been discarded as being beyond repair. On the software side, the board uses emulation software originally written for the Odroid Go handheld — which includes support for Nintendo systems including the NES and Game Boy Color, the Sega Master System and Game Gear, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, PC Engine, Colecovision, and more.
The small-production-run boards, created to gauge market interest, are being sold fully-assembled, but they're not everything you'll need: A Game Boy Pocket shell, microSD card, and lithium-polymer battery will need to be sourced elsewhere to build the Retro ESP32 up into a finished handheld console. The Game Boy Pocket housing will also require some minor modification, to make room for the USB connector and microSD card slot — and, optionally, a discarded cartridge case can be used to hide the LiPo battery.
The Retro ESP32 boards are available now on Tindie priced at $49.99; more information is available on the project wiki, or on the Retro ESP32 GitHub repository where the design files are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.