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This is a big one.
After almost a year of hard work, I'm glad to announce that the project "ilo musi 8" (ilo musi ali) has been completed. It's a CHIP-8 handheld game console. I've just started shipping it a while ago.
This project's fully open source with full procurement and assembly instruction available.
This device is also optimized for white-labeling with support of custom BOOTROM and enclosure sticker and alike.
As of the time of writing, ilo musi 8 is arguably the most well-polished handheld CHIP-8 game console ever published, and possibly the only one that's designed for production. Here are other CHIP-8 handhelds I've found and their shortcomings compared with ilo musi 8:
Apparently none of the those are meant to be manufactured at any scale. Meanwhile, my design is highly optimized for production batch size between 10~50 units. I've got 30 units of ilo musi 8 manufactured for the first batch.
For this project, I've also developed 7 (!) CHIP-8 ROMs for improving the user experience of the device, including:
All of these ROMs are available in the following Github repo: musi CHIP-8 pi jan Sate lon lipu Github
As a side note, I've also manually curated the CHIP-8 ROMs I've found all over the internet so that my game console comes with plenty of compatible games ootb.
8 years ago I tried making a handheld game console. I went thru a few iterations and I didn't manage to complete it. To be fair, even if I managed to get it done, I don't think it'd get anywhere because I was way too ambitious. I created an entire new platform. The users would be expected to make new games with the C API that I came up with. Since I'm not famous enough nor I'm any good in marketing, even if I managed to release the product in the form 8 years ago, what most likely to happen is that maybe a game or two would be made by my friends for my platform and then the project would just die off.
Therefore, for ilo musi 8, I'm adapting a better strategy. Instead of coming up with a new platform, I'm emulating an existing platform with a userbase but without a huge traction, which's CHIP-8. Emulating it allows more than 100 existing games to run on my game console out of the box. It also allows the games written for my console to run on other emulators, even on the web.
I consider this ilo musi 8 a revival of my previous failed handheld game console project. Unlike my previous attempt, I've also made a nice enclosure for it. I'm packing it with full accessories as well. It does look like a professional consumer electronic product.
The only shortcoming is that it's a bit expensive with cost of around $15 because I'm manufacturing in a small scale. I've got a day job and I don't have the time to manage a larger scale operation and I don't think that many people are gonna buy it anyway. Having said that the cost price and the selling price are still substantially cheaper than most products sold by other indie makers.
This is the largest personal project of electronics I've ever undertaken. And I've got it completed.
I've translated the UI into Sadalian Script, which is a writing system that I invented, making it the only gadget in the world that supports it. Along with its usage on this website and USCUR registeration and Omniglot listing, this UI translation helps on the legitimacy of this script. I'm shipping this product internationally and I'm planning to dominate the world with this writing system *evil laugh*. :P
Jokes aside, after 8 years, I've finally managed to revive the project and get it done. Fucking finally. This project means a lot to me, much more than other projects of mine.
One of my biggest dreams comes true. I'm almost crying as I'm writing this.
Let's hope that this open source project can inspire other people to do something even more awesome than I do.
Up next, I gotta get back on playing Genshin Impact after a long hiatus. :3
I'll also be slowly making blogposts about the technical aspect of ilo musi 8. Perhaps I'll also make a few more game ROMs for CHIP-8. Oh. I also need to spend some time on fixing the keyboard layout bug of ilo nena and a few other enhancements. And I gotta update the project listing of this website. After that, I'll work on my next two electronic projects (a remake of ilo nanpa ETA 2027, and an autosync clock ETA 2028).
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