Oh, how I've been waiting for this day to come...
Since I joined BitBuilt back in 2020, I have built many Wii portables... and that's all I've built! While I have had the urge to delve into the N64 and PS2 (which I may or may not have at-the-ready), something about portable Wiis has just brought endless bliss to my basement tinkering. After all, I had always watched Shank and Gman's YouTube videos on their portables, wishing I had the brains to do something like that myself. However, a great deal of my awe for this hobby started somewhere other than Wii portables. Rather, the first portablizing-related video I can recall watching is Ben Hecks "The Original Atari Portable Gaming Mod Is Back!". In line with that video, I can't fathom how many times I've watched his Original Atari 2600 VCS Portable Refurbishment and Atari 2600 Junior Single Chip Portable.
Now, there's another set of two videos that have inspired me for this build: Ben Heck’s Super Soldered Atari 2600 and Ben Heck's Hand Soldered Portable Atari 2600. Between these two videos, Ben Heck pulls the 3 main Atari 2600 chips, sticks them on a protoboard (along with the necessary passives) and wires them all together by hand to create a super compact, fully functional Atari 2600 circuit.
In this project, I intend to take this idea one step further. Given that the Atari 2600 schematic is readily available and widely understood around the web, there is a great plethora of information at my disposal to learn the ins and outs of how it works. Using these resources, I want to recreate the Atari 2600 schematic in KiCAD and create a compact PCB akin to Ben Heck's protoboard.
While this project is still very much in the ideas phase, I intend creating a Gameboy-esque Atari 2600 portable, featuring a 3.5" screen (leftover from my many G-Boy builds), my custom mobo, some random COTS 5v battery bank, as well as some form of generic audio amp (maybe even a U-Amp 1, as I have a few laying around).
This project is certainly going to be a learning experience for me, as I have never done anything significant with CAD, be it 3D modeling or circuit capturing. I am hoping that 4.5 months is enough time for me to do anything meaningful with this, so by golly I will try!