This NEC TurboExpress Handheld Is a Real Sleeper Build, Hiding a Raspberry Pi for Retro Emulation

Pseudonymous retro gaming enthusiast and maker "Dawilson246," hereafter simply Wilson, has given an old NEC PC Engine GT/TurboExpress portable a new life — as a pocket-friendly emulation station powered by a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computer.

"[A] Raspberry Pi in a TurboExpress," Wilson writes of his project, which uses the chassis of a non-functional NEC Home Electronics PC Engine GT handheld games console from the early 1990s. "No working TurboExpresses were harmed in the making of this."

NEC launched the TurboExpress Handheld Entertainment Console, which was known by the alternate name PC Engine GT in Japan, in 1990 as an answer to the popularity of the Nintendo Game Boy. Roughly the same size as its competitor, the TurboExpress ran the same HuCard games as the living-room TurboGrafx-16 console on a compact 2.6" color display — managing to eke around three hours of play from a set of six AA batteries.

Sadly, working TurboExpresses are a little hard to come by these days thanks to issues with their displays and capacitors — which means there's a glut of faulty units to be saved from landfill. That's exactly what Wilson's build has done: diverted a broken PC Engine GT from the waste pile and hacked the casing around to squeeze in a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B single-board computer as a major upgrade from the original hardware's HuC6280 7.16MHz CPU and mere 8kB of program RAM.

The quad-core single-board computer is used to run the popular RetroPie software, which provides a graphical loader for a range of emulation cores — allowing the device to play games from a range of vintage systems. The original control hardware is linked to the Raspberry Pi over USB through an adapter board, with the housing modified to provide external USB connectivity for add-on devices.

More images of the build are available in Wilson's Reddit post.