The little LCD screen driven with SPI via the Raspberry Pi Zero’s GPIO pinsĬertainly the brains of the operation, this little guy will run the Retropie linux image The undeniably classic Gameboy DMG shell/case that we’ll be installing everything in Gameboy DMG shell ( colorful versions here) See below for a full list of all the parts I purchased and a link to where I purchased them.

The other parts slowly amassed PCB with contacts for the rubber membrane buttons, USB sound card (the Raspberry Pi Zero has no analog audio output), speaker, audio amplifier for the speaker, lithium-ion battery, battery charger, and more. It certainly is on the small side but I wasn’t keen on modifying the Gameboy shell to fit a larger screen as I was quite motivated from the start to try and stay true to the original look and feel of the original Gameboy for nostalgias sake. I ended up going for a 2.4″ LCD SPI display because I wanted a quality, nice looking display which is definitely is. Another option is LCD displays that communicate via SPI to the Raspberry Pi, these tend to have much better quality and viewing angles, and are digital as opposed to analog so are sharper and can offer faster refresh rates. However these screens tend to have very average quality and poor viewing angles. There’s a great many ways to go here you can use a big screen that takes composite video (like a reversing camera display for a car), drill out the Gameboy shell to fit it and connect it very simply to the Raspberry Pi (just two wires). What good is a computer without a display! I spent so long looking for the right display I don’t even want to guess how long I searched. I went with the Raspberry Pi Zero as it was less work and still has enough power to run all the games I wanted to play.

the Raspberry Pi 3 however the Raspberry Pi 3 is a lot bigger and needed several connectors to be unsoldered to fit inside the Gameboy shell. Raspberry Pi Zero is quite underpowered vs. Next on the list was the Raspberry Pi, there was two options I considered a Raspberry Pi Zero or a Raspberry Pi 3 A+. Luckily it’s very easy to find newly injection molded DMG shells which are so incredibly cheap I couldn’t believe it! It even comes with the buttons and rubber membranes. Hard to go past the center piece of the whole build and that’s the original Gameboy DMG case. Partsįirst things first I hit the internet in search of all the parts, bits and bobs I’d need. I’ve explicitly opted for a more traditional look with a smaller screen that fits in the case without major modification. LCD, buttons, audio amp, lipo battery, charging circuit. Here’s my rendition of a Raspberry Pi Zero installed into a Gameboy shell along with the various bits e.g.

Gameboy 3ds s