In 2015, developer Kevin Bates released an 8-bit, credit card-sized gaming system on Kickstarter called Arduboy and is designed for people with good eyesight to play, create, and share free games. Now an even smaller version has arrived.

Originally designed as a digital business card, the first Arduboy prototype created a YouTube sensation in 2014. The company was then founded, followed by talks with new prototypes and production partners before debuting on Kickstarter in May 2015.

The 85x54x5mm (3.3x2x0.2 inch) Arduboy proved popular with backers, surpassing its funding target on its first day, and shipping began in August 2016. It included six touch-sensitive control buttons, a 128×64 OLED display, an ATmega32u4 processor with 2.5 KB of RAM and 32 KB of flash memory, a built-in piezo speaker, and a small LiPo battery for more than eight hours of operation on a single computer. charge to play.

The development team has upgraded up to 200 ready-made games developed by the Arduboy open source community, giving the device a significant memory boost for the recently released FX model. And now the newest member of the family has drastically reduced the overall size of the portable 8-bit player, while increasing the number of games to over 300.

This reduction resulted in some net losses. The Arduboy Mini is not housed in a solid metal/polycarbonate case, the speaker is broken and its onboard battery is dead, so gamers will need to power the device via the USB-C port (although solder pads are included to add the speaker and battery to the PCB if needed) .

The Mini retains the ATmega32u4 alongside a 128×64 monochrome OLED screen for displaying miniature gameplay footage, but the team added 16MB of flash memory and ALPS switches for tactile controls.

The setup is designed for hacking: all microcontroller pins can be used, there is a standard ISCP header for reprogramming the bootloader, and people can download files for 3D printable cases at home. With step-by-step tutorials available for hackers, students, and teachers, users are also encouraged to get their coding hands dirty.