microcat - The ultimative ARM based handheld game console

[DarkestEx]

I'd like to present you the new console @adekto, @Cumred_Snektron, @gbl08ma, @Streetwalrus and I are working on!
Special thanks to all of them, they are awesome

The microcat

Preliminary specifications:
- ARMv7 Core @ 120 MHz
- ESP8266 WiFi @ 150 MHz
- 128 KB builtin RAM
- High speed SDIO interface for SD cards for program and media storage (resulting in almost unlimited program and ressource sizes)
- 128x128px 16 bit OLED (about 1.5 inches in diagonal)
- 4 direction buttons, 4 action buttons, a soft power switch and a home button
- big expansion header
- Digital 16 bit audio and headphone socket
- LiPo battery with builtin charge circuit
- USB 2.0 full speed, host and slave

I bit of the typo on the specs(where I bolded it)
I also love to host and slave lol

Sorry, I don't get the typo. What should I change?

Also I have sad news about the WiFi. It looks like that we can't do it as we can't order the ESP8266 from a reputable seller in big amounts and second, the ESP8266 isn't a good WiFi SoC.
We either change WiFi chips (If you have a suggestion) or we go for Bluetooth and internet using your phone or maybe the ESP will get more stable over time (maybe it isn't crashing that often anymore at some point with some firmware.

[Araidia]

I'd like to present you the new console @adekto, @Cumred_Snektron, @gbl08ma, @Streetwalrus and I are working on!
Special thanks to all of them, they are awesome

The microcat

Preliminary specifications:
- ARMv7 Core @ 120 MHz
- ESP8266 WiFi @ 150 MHz
- 128 KB builtin RAM
- High speed SDIO interface for SD cards for program and media storage (resulting in almost unlimited program and ressource sizes)
- 128x128px 16 bit OLED (about 1.5 inches in diagonal)
- 4 direction buttons, 4 action buttons, a soft power switch and a home button
- big expansion header
- Digital 16 bit audio and headphone socket
- LiPo battery with builtin charge circuit
- USB 2.0 full speed, host and slave

I bit of the typo on the specs(where I bolded it)
I also love to host and slave lol

Sorry, I don't get the typo. What should I change?

Also I have sad news about the WiFi. It looks like that we can't do it as we can't order the ESP8266 from a reputable seller in big amounts and second, the ESP8266 isn't a good WiFi SoC.
We either change WiFi chips (If you have a suggestion) or we go for Bluetooth and internet using your phone or maybe the ESP will get more stable over time (maybe it isn't crashing that often anymore at some point with some firmware.

Finding a better one may be more expensive, but people are willing to spend the extra money for that. Having WiFi or not may be a game-changer for some.

[novenary]

Make WiFi optional. Ship the console without it but design the hardware to allow people to open it up and plug in their own esp8266 module. And of course this way you'll have to use USB for code upload and debugging (painless effort anyway).
Please though, for the love of everything good, do NOT use bluetooth. It's pretty common in laptops, phones and tablets but extremely rare in desktops (I don't have it even though I have wifi in my desktop). Also the whole thing just sucks in general.

[DarkestEx]

Make WiFi optional. Ship the console without it but design the hardware to allow people to open it up and plug in their own esp8266 module.

Well the problem is that first, the ESP8266 is horribly unstable and crashes all the time. I don't know if we can even make our own firmware for it, which would be required to do anything with WiFi at all (no, we won't use Frankenstein, NodeMCU or the crappy AT firmware as they all suck).
If the WiFi would be more stable (or maybe accessible over SPI) that all wouldn't be a problem.

Finding a better one may be more expensive, but people are willing to spend the extra money for that. Having WiFi or not may be a game-changer for some.

Yes, WiFi is important. I don't know if bluetooth could replace it. Well we could use internet supplied over a mobile phone which would certainly work, but in the end I don't know what would be better.

[novenary]

That's why I'm suggesting making it optional, this way if someone really wants it despite the issues they can have it. Wifi is pretty useless on such a device anyway. Also I edited my post above.

[DarkestEx]

That's why I'm suggesting making it optional, this way if someone really wants it despite the issues they can have it. Wifi is pretty useless on such a device anyway. Also I edited my post above.

Hmm yea Bluetooth couldn't really replace it. Also we can't make it optional. Not really. The reason is, that the form factor doesn't allow for the thick ESP8266 module but only for the canned SMD ones which we would be using. I mean, the WiFi is about 3 EUR in parts and we might find somebody who can sell us a few hundered of these I am sure. But the problem is the ESP8266 being unstable. Of course if people don't mind the WiFi crashing at times and having the ARM core to reset the ESP every here and then and the WiFi being slow, there is no problem. We can certainly come up with the firmware we planned and we can make a lot of error detection into it. The only real issue is the instability.

[novenary]

"Slow" is a little exaggerated lol, this kind of machine really doesn't need much bandwidth.

[Araidia]

"Slow" is a little exaggerated lol, this kind of machine really doesn't need much bandwidth.

But it what it needs is 64 Gigabytes of ram and a terabyte of storage

I'd like to present you the new console @adekto, @Cumred_Snektron, @gbl08ma, @Streetwalrus and I are working on!
Special thanks to all of them, they are awesome

The microcat

Preliminary specifications:
- ARMv7 Core @ 120 MHz
- ESP8266 WiFi @ 150 MHz
- 128 KB builtin RAM
- High speed SDIO interface for SD cards for program and media storage (resulting in almost unlimited program and ressource sizes)
- 128x128px 16 bit OLED (about 1.5 inches in diagonal)
- 4 direction buttons, 4 action buttons, a soft power switch and a home button
- big expansion header
- Digital 16 bit audio and headphone socket
- LiPo battery with builtin charge circuit
- USB 2.0 full speed, host and slave

I bit of the typo on the specs(where I bolded it)
I also love to host and slave lol

Sorry, I don't get the typo. What should I change?

The last preliminary spec says: "USB 2.0 full speed, host and slave"
It should be "save" instead of "slave"

[Ivoah]

The last preliminary spec says: "USB 2.0 full speed, host and slave"
It should be "save" instead of "slave"

Nope, slave is the correct word there. It means that the device can be plugged into a computer, or things like mice and keyboards can plug into it, like it was a computer. "Host" means stuff can plug into it, and "slave" means it can plug into stuff.

[Araidia]

The last preliminary spec says: "USB 2.0 full speed, host and slave"
It should be "save" instead of "slave"

Nope, slave is the correct word there. It means that the device can be plugged into a computer, or things like mice and keyboards can plug into it, like it was a computer. "Host" means stuff can plug into it, and "slave" means it can plug into stuff.

Well, I'm dumb. At least I learned something today.
Sorry for the inconveniences

[Ivoah]

The last preliminary spec says: "USB 2.0 full speed, host and slave"
It should be "save" instead of "slave"

Nope, slave is the correct word there. It means that the device can be plugged into a computer, or things like mice and keyboards can plug into it, like it was a computer. "Host" means stuff can plug into it, and "slave" means it can plug into stuff.

Well, I'm dumb. At least I learned something today.
Sorry for the inconveniences

No problem, glad you learned something

[novenary]

The proper word is device if you wanna be picky (that's the official terminology for USB).

[Ivoah]

The proper word is device if you wanna be picky (that's the official terminology for USB).

Really? I always thought the correct term was "slave" I guess I learned something new today too.

[novenary]

Yeah, while most buses use the words master and slave, USB uses host and device.

[DarkestEx]

The proper word is device if you wanna be picky (that's the official terminology for USB).

Really? I always thought the correct term was "slave" I guess I learned something new today too.

I guess I learned something too. Well I will change it.

"Slow" is a little exaggerated lol, this kind of machine really doesn't need much bandwidth.

But it what it needs is 64 Gigabytes of ram and a terabyte of storage

Well 64 GB of RAM is obviously not possible. But the 1 TB of storage actually is. We have full SDIO support and we implement FAT32 which supports up to 2 TB of storage. But in reality we will only support SD cards up to 32 GB. If we want to save some more RAM we could go for 4 GB as maximum SD card size too.

"Slow" is a little exaggerated lol, this kind of machine really doesn't need much bandwidth.

Well slow isn't that big of a deal. We might get up to maybe 100KB/s of maximum speed (theoretical) using maximum serial speed.
The bigger problem really is the stability of the ESP8266. It's very unstable and tends to crash very often.