RETRO-CM3: A POWERFUL RETROPIE HANDLED GAME CONSOL

thingiverse

This project draws inspiration from the adafruit's PiGRRL Zero and Wermy's original Gameboy Zero build. Those RetroPie based game consoles rely on the raspberry pi zero(W) as their core processor. However, after constructing several Pi Zero Consoles, two major issues arose. 1) The Raspberry Pi Zero (W) features a single-core Cortex-A7 and 512MB of RAM, which is sufficient for NES/SNES/GB type games. Nevertheless, when attempting to run PS/N64 Emus, the experience was quite unacceptable. Even some GBA games could not run smoothly, often exhibiting audio lag. 2) Most game console builds employ SPI or TV-out as their display interface. The SPI display requires CPU assistance with frame buffer drivers, resulting in a worsened gaming experience and limited FPS due to SPI clock speed. Moreover, the quality of TV-out displays is not satisfactory. This project will utilize the RaspberryPi Compute Module 3 and a DPI interface LCD to construct an ultimate RetroPie game console. Detailed instructions for building this console can be found on instructables at http://www.instructables.com/id/Retro-CM3-a-Powerful-RetroPie-Handled-GAME-Console/