The Arduboy is something that may appeal to all of those nostalgic Nintendo Gameboy fans. It is essentially a credit card sized electronic business card that can be programmed to play classic video games similar to those from the goold old days of retro gaming.
The Arduboy looks like a miniature Gameboy and it is roughly the size of a credit card. It is a little thicker than a real life credit card however but it is still very small none the less. It has a fully functioning d-pad on the left hand side as well as two action buttons on the left on the right hand side just like on the real Gameboy.
Due to the minute size of the onboard memory you can only load one game at a time on this little piece of hardware. How much memory is there you ask? The Arduboy only has 32 kilobytes of flash memory, 2.5 kilobytes of RAM, and a mere one kilobyte of EEPROM.
Arduboy comes with an impressive OLED display and it even has a built-in two-channel speaker system. You can play your favorite game on the Arduboy for up to eight hours before needing to recharge the battery. This little unit is designed for Arduino programmers out there in the community who want to create their own games and other software programs to run on this cute little credit card-sized computer.
The Arduboy is based on an open platform model where people can have fun creating applications and games which they can share in the cloud. You can get access to a ton of classic arcade games that have being programmed specifically for the Arduboy in the cloud. The arcade library continues to grow as more and more developers get their hands on one of these units and designs and shares their own games.
Looking at the specs in a bit more detail, it has an ATmega32u4 processor and it also comes with USB 2.0 connectivity. It has a built-in one-bit, 128 x 64 OLED screen and the rechargeable battery is a miniature 180 mAh powerhouse.
The team that created Arduboy currently list the selling price at $39 each with the eventual goal of bringing that price down even further. In addition to gaming there are tons of other applications that this thing can be used for. Seeing that these are very cheap, they can be used at promotions as electronic business cards and product brochures which come with a preinstalled game. With the right amount of creativity there are endless ways you can use these little wonders of miniaturized technology.
The Arduboy currently comes in white, red, green, blue, and yellow and for you hard core GameBoy fans the white one looks quite similar to the original Game Boy with the black d-pad and the cherry red action buttons. You can pre order yours today from the Arduboy website here.