FPGA with 2x the Power… and It Plays Real Cartridges

本站添加: 2026-05-12

[00:00:04]This might be the most exciting FPGA handheld I've seen in a while. Not only is this entire project open source, but it also plays your original physical cartridges. And honestly, with its more powerful FPGA chip, it has the potential to be even better than the analog pocket. So, let's take a look at it.

[00:00:31]Hey everyone, how's it going? My name is Tito and welcome to Macho Nacho Productions. Now, this here may not look like my normal setup, and that's actually because I'm editing and releasing this while I'm in Japan. So, I will be going back to my normal setup here after I return from the trip, but while I'm out here, I did want to cover some really cool projects to share with you. And the one we're going to be covering today, I'm actually really excited about. This here is the GameBub and it's an FPGA powered gaming handheld. Very much like the Chromatic and the Analog Pocket as well as the FPGBC. But there are a few really key things that I think make this better than any of these. Better than the Analog Pocket, better than the chromatic, and certainly better than the FPGBC. Now, before we get into all that, this project is the brainchild of Eli Lipsits. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. And this particular example was sent over by friend of the channel, Ken. Ken actually has his own YouTube channel, What's Ken Making? And he actually showcased how he built this exact one from scratch. Like, he put every single component onto the main board. And uh it was a huge undertaking.

[00:01:39]And like I said, this is an open-source project. So Eli, what he did, he actually opensourced this uh vertical variant. He actually has a horizontal version of this, kind of more like the Game Boy Advance, which he is selling on his crowd supply page. I'll have that linked down below if you are interested in picking one of those up. But I have to say, I do like the vertical one a little bit better than the horizontal version. Um, it's actually pretty wide.

[00:02:05]As you can see, it's wider than any of these consoles here. And it's actually also the thinnest one. If you compare it to all these, it's actually quite a bit thinner than even the analog pocket. And when you hold it in your hands, it feels good. It has enough width that it doesn't have to be a horizontal form factor. It just it still feels really good in the hands. And it being so thin, it's, you know, it just feels really good. Um, I have no complaints about how this feels. And the buttons are kind of these clicky buttons. Uh not the membrane buttons that we have on the FPGBC or the analog pocket or even this on the um on the chromatic, but more like the SP. So these have very SP feeling buttons. Actually, I think a lot of it is uh designed to mimic the SP. Uh the start and select are these small round buttons, and you have this menu button here in the middle. Now, before we actually turn this on, I did mention I think this has the potential to be better than any of these FPGA handhelds.

[00:03:05]And the the main reason why I think that is because of the FPGA that this uses.

[00:03:10]It's a XYLink Arctic 7 FPGA with 100,000 Logic cells. Now, because it's an AMD product, it has different uh metrics than the Analog Pocket, which I think is a Cyclone device, and they use Logic Elements versus Logic Cells. But a Logic Element and a Logic Cell, I think roughly are about the same. Now, if you compare the Logic Cells to the Logic Elements here, this has a 100,000 logic cells, and the Analog Pocket has about 50,000 logic elements. So roughly, and this is, you know, not precise at all, but the GameBub is about twice as powerful as the uh Analog Pocket. It gives it a lot more possibility to support a lot more complex cores. Now, the MR FPGA has 110,000 logic elements, so about 10% more than what's in the GameBub, and that can support Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, and PlayStation, which is awesome. So, I would love to see those cores come to the GameBub. I don't know if it's possible. Um, I hear it's theoretically possible, but obviously with the Analog Pocket only maxing out at 50,000, uh, those cores are probably not possible on the Analog Pocket. So, the potential of the GameBub is pretty extraordinary, and I would love to see those kinds of cores, those 32-bit consoles and 64-bit console come to the GameBub. That would be just amazing. So really the two main things that I think the GameBub has going for it is the hardware, you know, specifically the FPGA that it's uh using as well as the fact that it's open source. So it will have community support. Um as you know, Mr. FPGA is also open source. So that gets a ton of support and it has a lot of cores. So I do hope to see that same kind of support come to the game bub cuz that would be really amazing. Now before we actually turn it on, let's take a look around the device. Uh starting with the front and the first thing you'll notice obviously is the screen. Now, unlike the Analog Pocket or the Chromatic, which have more of the traditional more square type screen aspect ratio, the aspect ratio on this is more similar to the Game Boy Advance.

[00:05:14]Uh, the resolution of the screen is 720x480 and it is an IPS panel. So, it's a really nice screen. Once we actually turn it on and play Game Boy Advance games, it actually has a perfect two times integer scale for those games. So, it does fill up the whole screen. Now, when you play Game Boy, Game Boy Color games, it does crop a little bit, but it is also two times integer scale, but obviously it has a different aspect ratio than Game Boy Advance games, but we'll look at that here in a second. So, we have the screen, we have the D-pad, the buttons, uh, start, select, and then we have a menu button here, which, uh, when you press it in game, it will open up an in-game menu, so you can change certain settings. Uh, since we have the clear screen, we can see some of the components inside. uh one of which is this component right here which is a vibrating motor. So you do get like rumble feedback uh for certain games that support it. And other than that we do have the dual stereo speaker setup here as well which um I do believe yeah the analog pocket does also have a dual stereo setup but the chromatic just has the one uh speaker there on the bottom.

[00:06:23]And if we go to the side here, we can see the volume up and volume down button. And then on the other side, we have the power button as well as the micro SD card slot. If we look at the bottom here, we have the USBC port, which is for charging and I think maybe also loading firmware. We also have a 3 and 12 mm headphone jack for using your headphones.

[00:06:50]And if we look at the back, we got our LNR trigger, kind of similar to how the analog pocket is set up.

[00:06:59]And we have a very, very large 3000 mAh battery. And we also do have, I forgot to mention, we do have the link port connector here. This is a Game Boy, I believe this is the Game Boy Advance style one. Um, but other than that, it's a really elegant setup. I do like how it feels in the hands and and yeah, they did a really really good job design or Eli rather did a really really good job designing this. Um you can kind of tell I don't know if this is due to the print but it is kind of like bowed a little bit. Um so yeah, I mean this is this is kind of if you use a resin 3D print it can um warp slightly and I do see a little bit of a warp here but other than that it's a great looking device. I think Eli did a fantastic job. And the other thing back here that we have is a cartridge connector. So here you can actually put in your Game Boy Color, Game Boy, or Game Boy Advanced cartridge. Very much again like the analog pocket. Uh this supports physical cartridges which is really really cool.

[00:08:01]That's one of the things I love about these FPGA handhelds is that not only can you play games off of the SD card, which is very convenient, but you can also play your physical library of games. And I think that's another incredible strength of this device.

[00:08:13]Okay, so next we're going to power this on, see how it works, check out the user interface. But before we do that, I do need to tell you about the sponsor of today's video, PCB Way. If you have an idea for a new mod or want to assemble an open- source project, PCB Way provides you with the tools to make them a reality. from 3D printing services in an array of materials all the way to other services like CNC machining, injection molding, and of course PCB and flex ribbon fabrication. So, when it comes to taking your retro mods to the next level, PCB Way is the place to make that happen. Check out the link in the description for PCB Way to get $5 off your first order. And again, a huge thank you to PCB Way for sponsoring this video.

[00:08:58]Okay, so without putting in a game, let's go ahead and power this thing on.

[00:09:03]And as you can see, we're immediately booted into the main menu. And here it says game bub. And we have a few options. We have run cartridge, which we don't have connected right now. U we have load ROM, which will load a game from the SD card, which we do have inserted. We have settings, tools, and about. We're just going to go uh through each of these one by one, starting with settings. So here you can do dark mode or not dark mode. I'm not sure if See, it doesn't seem to change the menu, but I'm going to leave that on. You can change the date and time. Uh the rumble strength, I'm going to leave it off. You have enable DMG mode. Now, this is I think when you play a regular Game Boy game, it automatically defaults to the Game Boy Color palette, but if you enable DMG mode, it's going to be in more of the original Game Boy palette, which is kind of a more of a monochrome.

[00:09:59]Um, you can skip the boot animation. I'm assuming that's for that Nintendo logo that comes down. Oh, yeah. So, you can do that for the Game Boy. The you can skip the boot animation for the Game Boy Advance. And you can enable the Game Boy Player. I'm not exactly sure what that does, but we'll take a look at that here later. Um, if you go to tools here, we have mount the SD card over USB and then debug battery info. So, here we can see the battery information. Um, mount the SD card over USB. So, I wonder if this is to allow you to transfer uh games over USB. Let me see here if I click that. Exposing SD card to the USB drive. Okay. So, yeah, basically I think you can do that. You can hook this up to the computer and you can transfer files without having to remove the SD card, I'm assuming. And the last thing is the about. And yeah, here we see Eli Lipits.

[00:10:52]All right. Now, let's go and take a look at the real meat and potatoes. I'm going to plug in a Game Boy game first to see how that works. And I don't think you need to turn it off. You can just put in the cartridge. And then I'm going to hit run.

[00:11:06]And we are immediately loaded right into the game. And as you can see, it is a slightly windowed uh image. Um but it is a two times integer scale and it looks fantastic. And this is you can see the um the Game Boy. I'm going to turn the volume down. And you see we got the nice volume overlay. Very nice. So right now this is using the Game Boy Color template. I'm going to go ahead and hit this menu. And so it looks like we only have a we can either reset and we go to the main menu. I'm going to go to the main menu. I'm going to go to settings and I'm going to enable DMG. Go back and then let's uh run the cartridge again.

[00:11:43]Okay. And now you can see it's kind of running it not like the Game Boy Color, but it's running it like a DMG and we have these monochrome colors.

[00:11:52]So, yeah. Now, unfortunately, at least uh within this firmware version, you really can't change the the template.

[00:12:00]So, usually if you have like an aftermarket LCD screen on your Game Boy on your DMG or your Game Boy Pocket, uh you can kind of change the template. You can either tint this green, red, yellow, pretty much any color, but here it's only uh grayscale. And my understanding is the latest version of the firmware allows you to change those color templates, but this is the DMG version.

[00:12:23]Uh again, we do have the Game Boy Color version, but yeah, no, that works. Uh fantastic. So, let's actually get into the game. And this works absolutely fantastic. It looks great. Yeah, the screen is really, really nice. Yeah. No, this is really, really nice looking. And the two times integer scale scaling uh basically means we're not going to get any weird shimmering. Um cuz it's a perfect integer scale. And yeah, so yeah, the screen looks fantastic. Um all right, so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to try a Game Boy Color game. And then lastly, we'll try a Game Boy Advance game. And here I have Super Mario Bros. Deluxe. Let's put that in.

[00:13:01]Power it on. This powers on very quick.

[00:13:04]And then we're going to run cartridge.

[00:13:08]Ooh. Okay. So, I'm in DM. Okay. So, since I'm in DMG mode, this is basically not going to Yeah. So, basically, it thinks it's playing on a regular Game Boy, not a Game Boy Color. Um, so what we're going to do is we're going to go to the main menu. I'm going to go to the settings. I'm going to uh disable DMG mode. Go back. Now, let's run the cartridge, and it should run it as a Game Boy Color. There we go. Yeah. So, you really have control over what type of Game Boy you're using. And of course, this looks great. Overall, very good experience. Um, yeah, Eli did a really just a fantastic job here. Yeah, I'm I'm getting glare on my on my screen here.

[00:13:43]And uh Ah, okay. Uh but yeah. Okay, so that works great. And now let's go ahead and let's try um I'm actually not going to turn it off, but I'm going to pop in uh Metroid Zero Mission, one of my favorite Game Boy Advance games. And we're going to run the cartridge.

[00:14:04]And as you can see, the Game Boy Advance game fills the entire screen. And this is a perfect two times integer scale, and it looks fantastic. This looks really, really, really nice. Now, one thing, um let me see. Can we adjust the brightness?

[00:14:20]Oh yeah. So to adjust the brightness, you hold the menu button and you go down and then you go up. So that's a really nice feature. So I like uh the screen full brightness looks pretty good. Um not super bright, but bright enough. Oh yeah, this work this looks fantastic.

[00:14:38]Honestly, guys, this is pretty amazing.

[00:14:41]Oops.

[00:14:48]Yeah, this works really, really well.

[00:14:50]Yeah, very impressive. Okay, so Game Boy Advance games work just fine. Um, we're going to go ahead. We're going to close and go to the main menu. I'm going to take the cartridge out. Now, of course, you can play your physical cartridges, but uh one of the main attractions of this is you can play games off of the uh micro SD card slot. And Ken did load a few games on here for me. I'm just going to go to the top 20. Um, and these appear to mostly be GBA games. Uh, yeah, let's try uh What do we got? Let's try Castlevania.

[00:15:22]So, that's loading. And that loads super fast. Uh, that's that's really nice.

[00:15:28]And of course, it looks fantastic. Now, another really cool thing about the GameBub is, and this is also another reason why it's potentially better than all these other devices, is that it has a built-in accelerometer. So, let's say you wanted to play games that use utilize that. I think there's like two games or something for it. Um, one of which is obviously Kirby Tilt and Tumble. So, Kirby Tilt and Tumble I believe is a Game Boy Color game. Let's see there. Right here. So, um, let's give that a shot. Yeah. So, that's pretty good.

[00:16:05]Now, unfortunately, I got I have glare, but you can definitely Oh, but you can definitely see it does indeed work.

[00:16:19]Okay. Anyway, so I I apologize for the glare. I have lights everywhere, but uh trust me that the accelerometer within this works. So, that's another really cool uh feature of this device that uh pretty much I don't think any of these other FPJ devices have that feature. So, uh very cool that GameBub incorporates it. And it's pretty amazing. Um, as far as I know, Eli is the main person who's done this and the fact that he's done this all by himself. Uh, amazing. All right, so now that we have a sense of the capabilities of the GameBub, um, let's talk about the pros and cons of this device. Uh, starting with the pros.

[00:16:57]First of all, I love the form factor. I think it's fantastic. I'm sure the horizontal version uh that they're selling on Crowd Supply is really nice as well, but I do like how this feels in the hands. To me, it feels even better than the analog pocket. Um, and even maybe the chromatic, although the chromatic is nice because it mimics the original Game Boy Color and it does have that bump in the back to give you something to grip on. But obviously, this is a much better device than the Chromatic or the FP uh GBC cuz it supports Game Boy Advance. Um, now as far as core support, it does only support Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance currently. Now, obviously that can change. We know it has a more than capable FPGA chip. So, this down the road can certainly support 16-bit consoles like the Genesis, Super Nintendo. Um, and then I'm hoping it has enough power to even support 32-bit consoles like the Sega Saturn, the Sony PlayStation, and even the Nintendo 64. I I feel like it does have the capability to do that um since it does have a similar uh logic element count to the mister, but obviously that's going to take a lot of work uh from the community. Uh but I do hope to see that in the future. That would be absolutely amazing. So that's another pro is just the potential that this device has and to be able to have all those consoles in the palm of your hand. Absolutely amazing. And with that is the fact that this is an opensource project. So yeah, anybody in the community, the FPGA community, can really hack this and really make this into something that can support a huge swath of arcade titles, consoles, handhelds. It's just really the sky's is the limit. Not only is it open source, but it has an incredibly powerful FPGA chip. So, as well as other really cool features like the accelerometer and even the uh rumble support. I mean, this thing has everything. It's pretty incredible. they were able to package that into a pretty small um form factor. Now, another pro that I forgot to mention is the fact that this plays cartridges. A lot of the regular emulation devices, some, you know, some of the like Android devices or those Raspberry Pi devices, those typically can't play physical media, but these FPGA handhelds uh can, and I absolutely love that. So, being able to play your physical collection, I think, is a major major plus. Now, when it comes to the cons, because this particular version of the GameBub is open source, that means you're going to have to build it yourself. And if you watch Ken's video, he actually painstakingly uh put in every component into this. It is a huge undertaking. I think he said there's like over 300 components. Some of them are extremely small. There's even some BGA soldering that's required in order to get this up and running. So, this is definitely not a beginner project. Uh, however, there is probably ways you can have it built for you through services like PCB way, the sponsor of this video, but it's just a pretty expensive project to do on your own. But, of course, there is that crowd supply page, so you can buy this. Uh, Eli will be selling them, but I do think it is pretty expensive. Yeah. So, I'm looking at the crowdsource page. It bec it was fully funded. Uh, there are 547 backers, and if you did want to buy one of these, it's actually uh not too bad.

[00:20:13]It's $270 and I think for that you're getting a lot of potential capability.

[00:20:20]Um, I think it's certainly futurep proofed. Uh, the analog pocket I think is like a little over $200. So, this is pretty close. And for an open- source project to have this capability is, I think absolutely incredible. And I give a massive kudos to Eli for putting this all together and I think really making a compelling competitor to the analog pocket 270. That's certainly not cheap, but I think for that price, you're getting a really, really capable handheld. Now, another con would be the core support. So, right now there's only a Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance uh cores that are on this FPGA, but I fully expect that to be expanded upon in the future. So, yeah. I mean, honestly, I think this is probably one of the coolest things I've seen in in a while, especially in the handheld space.

[00:21:14]Now, of course, there's tons of very capable emulation handhelds, but this being an FPGA and more of a hardware emulator. You know, I think that's a little bit cooler than your standard emulation handhelds. I just think it's a cooler technology. It does mimic the actual hardware uh a little bit closer than software emulation. So, yeah.

[00:21:34]Overall, I think this is a fantastic handheld. Definitely watch Ken's video of him making this. He does deep dive into the actual components way more than I did. I just kind of did an overview of this project. Uh hoping to bring some attention to it cuz I really do want to see this flourish and get a lot more core support. Um but yeah, let me know what you guys think down below in the comments of the game bub and I'll see you in the next one.