Hi New to the ESPboy Community

#1

Hi! guys. I grew up in the 80’s playing games that you had to put quarters into. Yes, kids…you had to have real money on you (not a debit card) and had to inset the money to play the game!! I love that communities like this keep those games alive.

Anyway,I am fairly new to programming microcontrollers (but I’m not that good at it) and am working a project now where I am making my own digital watch using an esp32-C3. I have designed a prototype PCB and am using a 3-way nav switch and a single push button (see pics below). Now I thought it would be cool if I could put a few games on the watch (not a lot, maybe 5-10) that use basic left right and fire. At first I found Arduboy but those guys told me to “get the f— out of here with your weak-a$$ esp32”. Actually, they were very AWESOME and pointed me here.

So I guess my question is: is it possible to port the ESPboy to run on esp32-C3 with my peripherals (SH1106 oled, piezo buzzer and input switches) and launch it from within my watch program? I don’t know if the code has to boot it’s own operating environment or can be called as a subroutine. (sorry if these are newb questions, but I’m a newb).

Any help is appreciated!
Fish

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1 Like
#2

Your project is beautiful.
The Arduboy2 library is ported for ESPboy (ESP8266) and quite a few games can be recompiled for ESPboy with minor changes. Some of the games need more substantial modifications. The Arduboy games are loaded and run like the original ESP8266 application and not in emulation mode. So I don’t particularly understand how to run these games in a separate multitasking shell.
But it is possible to do it.
There are CHIP8/SCHIP, GameBoy, ZX Spectrum and some other emulators on ESPboy. You can probably find an emulator for ESP32-C3 on the net. I want to note that ESP32-C3 is quite a new chip, different from previous ESP32’s and even has an original architecture. I haven’t managed to work with this chip, so I can hardly tell you the best way to do it.
But one piece of advice is already there - find a ready emulator which is debugged for ESP32-C3 and try to run its games on your system.
The second tip is to take for example this game set https://www.tinyjoypad.com/ (there is a source code for ESP8266 with a set of 16 games) and try to port it to your system.