Odroid Gos, Faux Game Boys and Smartphones

2021-02-25

Odroid Gos & Faux Game Boys

If you have explored the rest of my capsule you may already know that I'm a fan of handheld gaming and my favorite devices for this are the PSP and the Odroid Go and Odroid Go Advance. Between the two Odroids the Advance is hands down the better device for playing games. It can play more games and systems, has more buttons for more advanced games and can do a lot more things in general. But I still love my Odroid Go and use it a lot despite it's technical inferiority. The main reasons I do so are portability or more precisesly pocketability and it was much less expensive. The Go Advance just enough bigger and more expensive than the Odroid Go that I feel significantly less comfortable stashing it in my pocket while out and about. The Odroid Go on the other hand is only a hair thicker than a smartphone with a case, shorter and at only $35 is much less of a bummer if I were to smash it to bits while on a bike ride, walk etc. The Advance is more of a carry it in my pocket while moving from room to room in the house situation.

I enjoy both the Go and the Advance but something I've been using the Go for lately other than gaming is listening to podcasts and music. The aforementioned pocketability and cheapness (in the cost sense) and having physical buttons are why I like it for this. However, the Go does not have a high quality DAC or headphone jack but luckily it has 10 GPIO pins broken out into a port on the top. So I made this very NOT pocket friendly DAC with headphone jack addon board that plugs into the top. It works great but ruins the Go's pocketability when attached. My goal is to get the components of the addon board fitted inside the enclosure but I have not gotten to that yet. The Odroid Go's built in speaker also does not sound good in an audio quality sense but it gives music this kind of grungy sound that I find kind of interesting. I don't listen to music this way when I want to enjoy the intricacies of good music but I queue up some good fun songs and set it next to me when I workout or when I'm outside and just want a little background music and I dig it.

Photo of the Odroid Go with DAC addon

This brings me to this very cool Retro ESP32 device which I seem to have missed out on purchasing. It is essentially the Odroid Go internals remixed onto a custom PCB designed to fit into a Game Boy Pocket shell. There are some differences from the Go which are improvements too such as adding a headphone jack, slightly larger lcd and hardware volume and brightness control wheels. I'm hoping they will come back up for sale again because the price is very reasonable at $50 for what is a really neat kit and it's compatible with the same firmwares that run on the Odroid Go. It fixes the biggest shortcoming of the Go AND does it in nostalgic style with the Game Boy Pocket shell design.

Retro ESP32

Retro ESP32 on Tindie

Smartphones

I have a Oneplus 3T and a Pinephone. I have been slowly using the Pinephone more as the software matures little by little. I've had Manjaro Plasma Mobile installed for about a month now and I use it to browse the web, the fediverse, gemini and control my music mostly. One big thing I was missing was a working xmpp client but I have recently tried gajim which is rather clunky but it works. If I could get a pebble app working with it then I would have pretty much everything I want. Though my pebbles may not be the only option for much longer. I have an open hardware and open software eink watch on order. More on that in a future post. It's getting closer but I'm not sure if I want to make the jump to using it full time just yet.

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