Adafruit MAME Arcade Cabinet (Photo : SOGO Tech News)
Adafruit has built and introduced the smallest Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) arcade cabinet in the world using a credit-card sized Raspberry Pi Zero computer. MAME arcade cabinets have become popular among gaming fans around the world. Adafruit's version uses a mini thumbstick and push buttons to play classic games including "Pac-Man" and "Donkey Kong."
These cabinets usually take up a prodigious amount of space. However, Phillip Burgess from Adafruit built a very small yet fully-functional arcade cabinet with a screen size of 0.96 inches, according to Tech Times.
The cabinet is more of a computing solution than a fun project. Adafruit also has not provided a complete guide about how to build the device so do-it-yourself fans will have a big challenge.
The dimensions of the arcade cabinet are 2.6 x 1.3 x 1.4 inches deep (67.2 x 33.6 x 35.8 millimeters)
Burgess got the idea while talking about a small accessory board called a gaming "bonnet" for the Raspberry Pi Zero. It would include some basic controls and a very small monochrome OLED display.
The engineers then wondered if the unit could include a color OLED. A few problems were that the very small color display produced unclear pixels, and the RGB OLED display combining red, green, and blue would cost several times more than the $5 CPU.
Burgess used a program named NanoScreen to adjust the image quality on the tiny screen. He used a 4x4 pixel average to scale the original images to a 1:4 ratio while saving the game's details.
Gamers can use the tiny cabinet to play several classic arcade games, but using the device is very difficult.
The main goal of building the world's smallest MAME arcade cabinet was to bring back retro games to a tiny screen. It was also able to fit it in a small case and become the world's smallest version.
Adafruit has posted a YouTube video that shows players using the MAME arcade cabinet. Burgess' work has received many praises for building a fun gaming system with tiny controls.
In related news, two shorts for the "Pokémon Generations" series have been uploaded to YouTube. The first episode represents the entire Pokemon franchise starting with the Game Boy games, according to Polygon.
Pokémon fans will remember "Pokémon Red" while watching the first minute of episode one. The Game Boy title was released in Japan in February 1996.
Here's Adafruit's Cupcade mini arcade cabinet:
