Developer Kevin Bates, creator of the Arduboy, has launched a campaign on Kickstarter to finance the Arduboy Minithe last project that has been carried out in order to create a very small clone of the Nintendo Game Boy.
The Arduboy Mini is not in itself a new development, since we echoed it in 2019, when a prototype compared to the original model was shown through the official YouTube channel.
As can be read in the Kickstarter campaign, the Arduboy Mini is a “8-bit open source console with more than 300 games (pre-installed) on a small circuit board. Learn to code and share your games online for free.” As a base it takes an Arduino motherboard, hence its name, and includes six buttons and a small OLED screen that supports a resolution of 128 × 64 pixels. The rest of its features are a 16MHz ATmega32u4 processor, 2.5KB of RAM and a USB Type-C port packed into a device that is 1.6mm thick.
The very small dimensions and its modest features make the Arduboy Mini do not have a battery or speaker, so these elements must be supplied through the contacts that the console has exposed, although for the first thing you can also use the USB Type-C port to connect it to an external battery or directly to the current through the corresponding adapter (a mobile charger should do). Another point to note is that, compared to the Arduboy Fx, it lacks a case, so care should be taken when putting the Arduboy Mini in a pocket.
The Arudboy Mini’s Kickstarter campaign was set to raise $10,000 and is already running at over $45,000, showing that the console, within its parameters, is piqued. Kevin Bates has run various campaigns successfully and honestly, so he’s supposed to be a creator you can trust.
Obviously, neither the Arduboy Mini nor the Arduboy Fx are products aimed at the general public, but rather at enthusiasts of this type of device and people who are interested in learning how to develop software (games in this case) starting with simple projects, since Arduboy consoles are not initially made for emulating other platforms, but for running the games that are made for them.
