Back in the earlier days of the Raspberry Pi, there was a project going around called PiGrrl. It’s of course, a play on the name “Game Boy”. It’s essentially just a Raspberry Pi in a GameBoy like housing.
I built one back in 2021. I don’t think I ever really posted about it because beyond building it, I never really used it much. If anything this is a bit of a discouragement to anyone else looking at a similar project.
It never worked real great, and shortly after I just, bought a Retroid Pocket 3 which does, basically the same thing only better. And these days there are a lot of little emulation based gaming handhelds out there.
But I was sorting through my old “Things to blog about” folder and figure it was worth documenting a bit. Half the hassle was getting the parts, because it was still COVID and ordering some of the guts at affordable “ship me some cheap Chinese stuff” was not so easy. Also, nothing really comes with instructions beyond the basic idea. Particularly in how to actually assemble everything.
I did get it to work though, except it still needed to be plugged in. Also, the Raspberry Pi I was using didn’t have Wifi so any networking also needed a cable. You don’t normally need networking for a retro handheld mind you, but it was needed to do configuration through SSH or loading ROMS more easily via FTP.
