The Epic Minimalist Entertainment System is the leader of the itsy bitsy games console committee with its reverse-engineered 1980s LED dot matrix display

HardwareThe Epic Minimalist Entertainment System is the leader of the itsy bitsy games console committee with its reverse-engineered 1980s LED dot matrix displayWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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EMES - Epic Minimalist Entertainment System - YouTubeWatch On

EMES - Epic Minimalist Entertainment System - YouTube

You can keep your hulking modern handheld gaming machines. Compact retro systems? Pah! Don’t bother with any of them when you can go seriously old-school and super-small, both at the same time, with the EMES—a games machine that’s barely bigger than your thumb and has cartridges smaller than a fingernail.

As an entry to Hackaday’sTiny Gamescompetition, if I was on the judging panel then theEpic Minimalist Entertainment System(EMES) would win hands-down. The rules of the competition aren’t remotely strict but the standards of the past winners have been outstanding. So what makes the EMES special, then?

Well, it’s seriously tiny—the whole device isn’t that much bigger than a one Euro coin and it comprises a display, four buttons, a slot for the game ‘cartridges’, and a buzzer. You might think that such a small size makes it virtually unusable but as you can see in the above video, it’s not too hard to play a few rounds of Pong on it.

You need another system to program the ATTiny10, of course, but that’s no different to any other games console that uses cartridges. With so many features and such a basic microcontroller (it only has four input/output pins), it’s no trivial task getting it all to work.

For example, the buzzer and the display’s brightness control share the same IO pin, but the creator’s solution was to have the output frequency above the buzzer’s audible range for full brightness and then drop the frequency, and display’s duty cycle, to activate the buzzer. The display naturally dims but not enough to be a problem.

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