“It's a very nice little gaming console with a decent display and an aluminium case that looks and feels quite sturdy and durable. You can find some games for it on the internet - but the real fun could be writing those by yourself. When I tried I found a reason that makes me write this four-star-only rating. To access the debug pins of the built-in RP2040 you have to open and remove the case. It would have been much nicer if there was one removable panel with those pins behind...”
“The case looks awesome. "SPI IPS LCD" is in all likeliness a ST7789 TFT chipset and I already own a few of these and I love them so this was part of my plan to buy more of them. If memory serves they can readily do 16-bit color (5:6:5 RGB) and 18-bit (6:6:6 RGB)--that's 262,144 colors!--and are stunningly detailed at 240x240. I'm already a Pico-8 Lua developer so I'm used to 128x128 so that's 3.5x more pixels! Limor Fried raved back in 2021 about the PicoSystem's buttons which had me sold immediately before I even know what an ST7789 was so it feels like I've been trying to buy one of these for years. I already own a Pimoroni PicoVision so I'll be comparing the two as I dig deeper into the ST7789 and the RP2040's capabilities so I can compare it to the PicoVision's Pico-as-a-GPU configuration. Looking forward to pushing the two to their absolute limits.”
“Well built, feels very premium.
There's a decent little community making games for it, and it can run things like an NES emulator without too much issue.
I am not currently a skilled enough C++ developer to make anything worth playing for it, but I did manage some basics reasonably quickly.”
“I'm really impressed by what this tiny thing is able to do! I was able to write a simple game in a matter of hours... You can even upload a NES emulator on it.”
“A very solid build. Almost indestructible and I expect children will love it, which is why I shall be using in school as on of my many 'distractions' as an intro to coding generally. the stock game is good, I am hoping that changing and installing a new game is as easy as the other PIMORINI gadgest I also show off. Usually with lots of 'Oohhs and 'aahs! Game on!”