RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch (github.com)
194 points by mariuz 19 hours ago
flopsamjetsam 18 hours ago
From the GitHub page:
> It is a Gameboy Advance from a parallel universe where RISC-V existed in 2001. A love letter to the handheld consoles from my childhood, and a 3AM drunk text to the technology that powered them.
jihadjihad 17 hours ago
Thank you to the author for writing a GitHub page in 2026 that is entirely devoid of emoji.
LukeShu 16 hours ago
I mean no disrespect to Luke Wren, but he did not write it in 2026; he wrote it in 2018-2021. :)
tough 17 hours ago
on the other hand having emoji on the readme is a great signal of llm-slop on my radar
jstanley 10 hours ago
Dwedit an hour ago
The GBA was designed around having no cache. With a few exceptions (such as Internal RAM, Video RAM, IO registers, BIOS, OAM, Palettes), everything goes out to an external bus. Going out to an external bus with no cache will basically slow you down to 80s computer speeds. Fetching instructions from the cartridge ends up being around twice as fast as a GBC.
The way around that is using a cache, and sequentially fetching multiple words. Sequential fetches can be made faster, increasing throughput, and that can hide the latency if enough instructions/data gets cached.
I wonder how this system is designed, is it going to the memory bus for all fetches, or does it use a cache?
bananaboy 17 hours ago
Oh this is Luke Wren’s work. He’s an ASIC design engineer at Raspberry Pi. Amazing project, I love it!
LukeShu 16 hours ago
I think "ASIC design" engineer is under-selling him--he's working on their CPU cores too!
bananaboy 15 hours ago
Haha yeah I just went by his LinkedIn title
mithro 8 hours ago
The design was taped out on the first wafer.space run (see https://github.com/wafer-space/ws-run1) but I have not heard if it actually worked or not.
sehugg 8 hours ago
The programmable scanline-buffer-based rendering pipeline described in the PDF is worth a read for fans of such things.
wewewedxfgdf 16 hours ago
This guy also designed DVI/HDMI from RP2040:
LukeShu 16 hours ago
He works at Raspberry Pi, and designed the Hazard3 RISC-V core that is at the heart of the RP2350--although he did Hazard3 in his spare time. It's actually a fork of the "Hazard5" core that he designed for the RISCBoy.
dmitrygr 28 minutes ago
The author of this is one of the greatest minds of our time. While doing this is cool, he also designed the Hazard3 core in the RP2350 as well as the QSPI unit in it -- the only memory-mapped QSPI unit I've encountered so far that I've not been able to crash or hang.
MomsAVoxell 15 minutes ago
I echo your QSPI sentiments .. and the RP2350 is simply badass. So many, many applications. The sonic screwdriver of bus pirates ..
haebom 4 hours ago
Is the greatest challenge in adopting this new hardware architecture the technology itself, or the lack of an existing developer ecosystem and software toolchains?
joshu 18 hours ago
i love the "hardware from an alternate universe" projects.
MomsAVoxell 13 minutes ago
All hardware exists in an alternative universe until it is manifest in ours.
LukeShu 16 hours ago
I'm surprised to see that it's OK that he has opensource AHB/APB stuff in it--I'd avoided learning them too much about them assuming that they were ARM proprietary.
bri3d 16 hours ago
AMBA has been an open standard for a really long time, I think maybe since it was released?
iFire 19 hours ago
Does RISCBoy run Godot Engine? How can I make RISCBoy run Godot Engine?
ZiiS 9 hours ago
This is a much smaller device then anyone has ever exported Godot to.
More practical would be to port https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020 so that https://github.com/chrismaltby/gb-studio could support it.
makapuf 4 hours ago
Its not a computer, its a small device. You dont have many unknown peripheral you dont have other programs. The memory and peripherals are there, just use them. Heap is complicated ? Preallocate everything. A peripheral is not used ? Just leave it there. Security ? Of what ? Thats the appeal of those devices.
bananaboy 17 hours ago
If you set up the RISCBoy toolchain and port it then yeah.
wren6991 4 hours ago
Why do you want an engine? Just write games
MomsAVoxell 12 minutes ago
Yeah, the purpose of these kinds of designs is to not have to deal with 3rd party engines. The machine is the engine.
matheusmoreira 2 hours ago
Your comment got downvoted but I think there's deep truth in it. I've been decompiling GBA games from my childhood and it's remarkable how engineless they seem to be.
Narishma 18 hours ago
No. You can't.
emilfihlman 17 hours ago
I'm quite willing to bet it can be done in this era of enabling developers with slob, which still usually works.