Tim Aidley's "Retroey" Portable Raspberry Pi Case Is a Dedicated PICO-8, Picotron Workstation

Maker Tim Aidley has built a portable computer designed specifically for working and playing with fantasy consoles like the Lexaloffle PICO-8 and its successor Picotron — housed in a custom-designed 3D-printed chassis and powered by a Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer.

"Around Thanksgiving last year I decided it was time to do a little pixelly gamedev with Pico-8 and Picotron," Aidley explains of the project's origins, "but I got distracted by the idea that it would be cool to build a retroey bit of hardware designed specifically to work well for developing and playing those games on. This current case is just the prototype, and I am considering making some aesthetic changes — in particular add a bunch of grilles for that authentic Amiga 80s computer feel."

Released in 2015 by Lexaloffle Games, PICO-8 is one of a number of "fantasy consoles" — virtual machines that mimic the limited resources of typically eight-bit consoles and microcomputers of the 1980s. In March last year, the company launched Picotron as a successor — shifting from mimicking the features of an eight-bit system to a later 16-bit workstation.

While most use an existing computer to play and develop PICO-8 and Picotron games, Aidley wanted a dedicated device — and set about building one from a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer. The 3D-printed chassis holds the SBC, a 68-key mechanical keyboard, 10" touchscreen display — which renders the lower-resolution 128×128 and 480×270 PICO-8 and Picotron displays at pixel-perfect 4× and 2× scaling respectively — and an integrated battery good for eight hours. There's an amp an internal speakers, plus a headphone socket, room to store accessories, and a floppy drive for loading games off disk — while a switch on the front flicks between running PICO-8, Picotron, or just loading into the Raspberry Pi OS desktop.

"I got started on the old eight-bit home computers, and PICO-8 really reminds me of them, and I wanted to capture some of that in the design," Aidley says of his dedicated machine, the housing for which was 3D printed in sections. "The floppy drive is more from the 16/32-bit era that came afterwards, which is what Picotron imitates, but I remember the feeling of having a game on a floppy, so I wanted to have that too. Although including a tape drive for games would be more eight-bit authentic, I thought that would be going a bit too far."

More information is available in Aidley's Reddit post.