DIY game console

Building your own Netduino-powered Game Console – Part 1

Posted on by fabienroyer

So, you’ve decided to build your own PIX-6T4 game console and you’re excited about learning C#?

Awesome! Buckle up, you’re in for a wild ride 🙂

The first step of your journey starts with gathering a few parts, which you can find listed in this spreadsheet along with their current retail price and links to the suppliers. In a nutshell, you’ll need about $95 to get all the required parts.

In an effort to keep the number of suppliers down to a minimum for your convenience, most of the parts for the PIX-6T4 prototype come from Sparkfun Electronics.

However, there are many alternative suppliers out there and with some research in Octopart, you will be able to reduce the cost of building this prototype.

Next time, we’ll cover the first step of the build, laying out the IC sockets, the analog joysticks, and some headers on the prototyping board, just like this:

 

 

Cheers,

-Fabien.

 

Build a Netduino-powered Game Console

Posted on by fabienroyer

Over the past few months, my friend Bertrand and I have been working on a game console, the PIX-6T4, which is powered by a Netduino mini.

The console is designed as platform for learning digital electronics and C#: we’re in the process of writing a book covering all aspects of building the console, how its components work and how to write games for it with our framework.

Here’s a video of the prototype of the console below:

and here, as we presented it during the Ask An Engineer Show-And-Tell run by AdaFruit on Google+ last weekend: http://vimeo.com/26943990

As always, it’s entirely open source / open hardware and we hope that you’ll have as much fun building your own and making games as we did, which we will cover in a series of upcoming posts, often referring to past articles on this blog.

Cheers,
-Fabien.

Make Blog: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/07/build-a-netduino-powered-game-console.html

MSDN Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/netmfteam/archive/2011/08/10/netmf-student-and-hobbyist-projects.aspx