Thinking of making portable system but...

[Uzumaki]

I wanted to make something that isn't covered in Ben's book or has been done here.

Atari 5200 is huge and at best a candidate for laptop style portable.

I only have one working 7800 and I'd rather not blow it up.

Atari Lynx... duh it's already portable

Coleco Tri-star system... only 4 games??? not worth it (it does have unique triangle shaped carts)

Intellivision II maybe since the main board is about the size of standard NES board and can take plain vanilla power input. Only drawback is the controller is like Colecovision and some games do make heavy use of the number pad, especially my favorite D&D: Cloudy Mountain.

Odyssey^2 would be a problem as some games uses keyboard. Maybe Odyssey^2 laptop with real keyboard not the cheap flat sheet crap.

I would love to have portable Vectrex as its mainboard is small enough. Problem is no one makes vector based LCD display, and it's much harder to build vector to raster converter than it's worth. Might be easier to hack those portable 5" B&W TVs that you can still find for under $30 now.

I'd like to try and make portable TG-16 since Turbo Express is very hard to find and fairly expensive on eBay (plus its small screen is too small for a few games). TG-16's board can be cut almost 1/3 with little problem. And I'd need a Turbo Booster PLUS for the battery backed RAM for storing game saves. As an added bonus if I find the 8 pole double throw switch, I can make portable TG-16 take PCE games without converter

Virtualboy is not really comfortable to hold or mount on head and they can't really be played away from your face. VB is probably the only portable, non-hand held video game system around.

CDi, 3DO, CD32, other lesser non portable systems I have no experience with them so I have no idea what it takes to make them portable.

[ransoman]

I don't think anyone has made a proper Master system portable yet (the game gear is used to justify not doing it, but the screen is horrible, Could make a nice system)

[bicostp]

If you like the Commodore 64, Radio Shack sells a Humemr steering wheel game that can act as a complete C64 board. (I think its mainboard is only about 5 by 6 inches.) It's pretty simple to hook up a PS/2 keyboard. I believe it can even generate S-Video. Perfect C64 laptop right there!

The problem is that it needs a couple modifications to be closer to a real C64:

- There's a trace on the board which shorts out a surface mount resistor. You need to desolder the resistor and cut the trace. It works just fine without this mod, but the drum channel will be too loud.

- The picture is dark and muddy unless you swap a couple rows of surface mount resistors. They have common values, but Radio Shack doesn't sell them you would have to buy them from Mouser or Digikey. Again this is optional, but a good idea.

- You only have to solder two wires onto the motherboard to get BASIC functionality, and they are both through-hole. Then you just need to connect the keyboard to a 5v source. Horray simplicity!

Here's more info:
http://galaxy22.dyndns.org/dtv/hummer/index.html

[Sparkfist]

I don't think anyone has made a proper Master system portable yet (the game gear is used to justify not doing it, but the screen is horrible, Could make a nice system)

Nin-Nin was working on one, it's still under the "Status" section of Portablesofdooom.org. Really no one has made an SMS for the key reason that here in the states it wasn't that popular and I believe it's physiclly bigger then the NES. I'm not saying it's not possible just say that those are the reasons some people haven't made one yet.

With your Ataris you're stick keeping them consoles. Both the 5200 and 7800 are too big and are not able to be cut down like the 2600s were. All the other systems you mentioned you gave reason why you felt they were not worth the time investment.

If you really want a portable, choose a console, and if it's in a controller/joystick backage pick it up. Those joysticks are very easy to work with and you can get the basics of what you need to do done on those. Otherwise if you want a larger system, if you go the route of NES, SNES, Atari 2600 or PSone you should buy Ben's book. He covers all the things you need, what you need to do, and is very well writen in how the process goes. On top of that it's written for people that don't know anything about eleectonics so anyone can read it and understand what's going on.

Good luck on your future project.

[Uzumaki]

There is a reason I didn't pick Sega Master System. I already own Game Gear with the SMS adapter plus my creation nthe card adapter that lets me use any card games with Game Gear.

A portable C64 would be nice but my favorite games are all on disks like the Ultima series. If someone can figure out how to convert 4 double sided disks of U5 to cart with battery save, I'd take my dead laptop and make a C64 laptop out of it.

Other 80's era computer like TRS-80 and TI-99/4A are much too big and no one makes mini version yet. Apple IIc could be made into laptop since it is small with built in disk drive, all you'd need is to mount an LCD display.

[wallydawg]

Atari Lynx... duh it's already portable

haha portable by definition only. That thing is at least a foot long.

[Uzumaki]

Atari Lynx... duh it's already portable

haha portable by definition only. That thing is at least a foot long.

Original Lynx yes, Lynx II is closer to Game Gear size.

[gamer2]

SHAMMMOOOOO III PORTABLE!!!


sorry,


normally I would use my "PCp" joke but not that its been done....nah.

Rootbeer keg portable, ROOTBEER ANYTIME!

[Uzumaki]

I know what to build now. There's a few NOS pile of AY-3-8500 chips that were used in many pong clones of the mid 70's. The chip alone plus 2 support chips could easily be smaller than a 9v battery and those sucker lasts a long time. All that'd be left is to mount them inside a PSOne LCD display, and add a knob or 2.

Just kidding. No need to waste a $50 LCD display on a 30 year old technology that does only B&W display.

I'll probably go with TG-16 as I have 2 (one like mint with TurboCD add on and another to blow up). Next may be Inltellivision II if I can get a spare Inty 2.

[CronoTriggerfan]

TG sounds cool, they were neat systems. And if you've got the cash, an AES portable would be pretty neat!

CTFan