Turning an Ultra-Cheap “Electronic Game” Into a Fun Arduboy

The worst thing a kid could receive in the ‘90s was the dreaded “electronic game.” They were ultra-cheap handheld devices that could only play a single game and usually didn’t even do that well. But they were designed in such a way that well-meaning grandparents would assume they were just as good as a Nintendo Game Boy, like the store brand version of Fruit Loops. Apparently that deception never quite disappeared and some desperate manufacturers are still producing similar products. Luckily, X3e was able to turn their electronic game into an Arduboy that is actually fun.

X3e purchased this game from Wibra, which is a chain of discount stores in the Netherlands. Like similar stores around the world, Wibra has a lot of items of questionable quality and that includes this “Mini Brickgame.” It appears to be a device that has remained unchanged for the last 20 years and has simply been rebranded by various corporations. But though its electronic components were undesirable and nearly useless, X3e felt fondness for the device’s throwback design. So, they dropped €2.50 to rescue the game from the discount bin and got to hacking.

This is a really small device without much room to work with inside the enclosure, so X3e needed some small components. The two most important of those are an Arduino Pro Mini board and a SSD1306-driven OLED screen. That Arduino model is now discontinued, but it has a Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller that is compatible with an alternative version of Arduboy. The display is roughly the same width, but the height is much smaller. That leaves a gap at the bottom of the enclosure’s window, but it doesn’t look bad. Power comes from the original LR44 batteries and X3e added an external pin header for debugging without opening the case.

The big challenge was connecting the membrane buttons from the original PCB to the Arduino. The designers of the original device routed the traces in an unusual way, with some buttons connected directly to pins and others multiplexed. But X3e was eventually able to get the Arduino reliably reading button presses.

Now the “Wibraboy” can play all of the fantastic community-developed games that are available for the Arduboy.