The Epic Minimalist Entertainment System, with its replica LED dot matrix display from the 1980s, is the small game console committee's top pick.

EMES – Epic Minimalist Entertainment System – YouTube

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You can keep your huge modern handheld game consoles. Compact retro systems? Ugh! Don't bother with any of them when you can be truly old-school and super-small at the same time with the EMES – a game console that's barely bigger than your thumb and has cartridges smaller than a fingernail.

If I were a participant in Hackaday's Tiny Games competition and I were on the jury, the Epic Minimalist Entertainment System (EMES) would win hands down. The competition rules aren't the least bit strict, but the standards of previous winners have been outstanding. So what makes the EMES so special?

Well, it really is tiny – the whole device is not much bigger than a one euro coin and consists of a display, four buttons, a slot for the game cartridges and a buzzer. You might think that its small size would make it practically unusable, but as you can see in the video above, it's not too difficult to play a few rounds of Pong on it.

The killer feature for me though is the dot matrix LED display. It's a reverse engineered clone of a 1980s Plessey GPD340, made by the same person who designed the EMES. With just two characters and a double 5 x 7 monochromatic pixel layout, it's as simple as can be but suits the project really well. However, the gap between characters adds an element of surprise to Pong, so it would be nice to see the EMES with a slightly better display.

As with the first game consoles you could buy, there is no processor on the board itself. Instead, it is embedded in the game cartridge… well, a breadboard. The puny board houses an 8-bit ATTiny10 microcontroller running at 8 MHz and offering just 1 kB of flash memory and 32 bytes of RAM.

You'll obviously need a different system to program the ATTiny10, but that's no different with any other game console that uses cartridges. With so many features and such a simple microcontroller (it only has four input/output pins), getting everything to work is no easy task.

For example, the buzzer and the display brightness control share the same IO pin, but the designer's solution was to set the output frequency above the buzzer's audible range for full brightness, and then lower the display's frequency and duty cycle to activate the buzzer. The display will naturally dim, but not so much that it's a problem.

I love engineering projects like this and admire anyone who has the passion, skills and determination to make something like this happen, even if it's just for a fun competition. The Epic Minimalist Entertainment System is really something special though – the construction itself is very high quality and as someone who has repeatedly burned my fingers with a soldering iron, I'm always amazed at how someone can make something so small.

The Epic Minimalist Entertainment System, with its replica LED dot matrix display from the 1980s, is the small game console committee's top pick.

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The Epic Minimalist Entertainment System, with its replica LED dot matrix display from the 1980s, is the small game console committee's top pick.

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