2024 Tiny Games Contest: An Epic Minimalist Entertainment System, Indeed

One way to keep things tiny is to make a system with cartridges where the brain lives on each cartridge instead of the platform itself. [Michael]’s Epic Minimalist Entertainment System …read more

One way to keep things tiny is to make a system with cartridges where the brain lives on each cartridge instead of the platform itself. [Michael]’s Epic Minimalist Entertainment System (EMES) is one of those, and boy, is it tiny. EMES makes use of the ATtiny10, and they don’t get much AT-tinier than that. This nearly microscopic console uses an equally Lilliputian display — a Plessey GPD340 vintage LED display, in fact. (Check out [Michael]’s reverse engineering project if you want to play around with these.) There are four ultra-small buttons for control and a buzzer for sound. Now, the ATtiny10 is an 8Mhz microcontroller with 1KB of flash and 32 bytes of RAM. It has an 8-bit ADC and a somewhat surprisingly high four GPIO pins. But of course, that’s not enough. Not with the display, the four buttons, and the buzzer, so [Michael] had to come up with a way to multiplex everything to four GPIOs. PB0 is shared between the buttons and the display’s serial data input. PB1 cleverly outputs the same PWM for both the brightness control and the buzzer. When the buzzer is needed, [Michael]’s code switches to a lower frequency and adjusts the duty cycle of the display to keep it readable. PB2 and 3 are serial clock inputs for the two display halves. Be sure to check it out the heated PONG action in the video after the break! There’s still a little bit of time to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest! You have until Tuesday, September 10th, so head on over to Hackaday.IO and get started!

This is the first time I’ve seen the word “lilliputian”, which my phone’s auto correct seems to indicate has the core of “lilliput” (a fictional small land according to an online dictionary), which indicates to me that this is the core of a Pokémon name of lillipup – a tiny puppy Pokémon. I’ve always just assumed it was a cutesy sounding made up name. Well into my 30s I’m still learning obscure trivia about Pokémon in the wild world of linguistics.
Thanks for reading my blog. Also, great article as always. Lilliput is from the 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels. It’s also where we get the terms big and little endian, and the word yahoo. Not a bad legacy for being almost 300 years old! Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy) This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
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https://hackaday.com/2024/09/08/2024-tiny-games-contest-an-epic-minimalist-entertainment-system-indeed/