RETRO-CM3: A POWERFUL RETROPIE HANDLED GAME CONSOL

thingiverse

This project is inspired by the adafruit's PiGRRL Zero and Wermy's original Gameboy Zero build. Those RetroPie based game console use the raspberry pi zero(W) as their core. BUT, after I have built several the Pi Zero Consoles, two main problems were found. 1) The Raspberry Pi Zero (W) has only single core Cortex-A7 and 512MB ram, which is OK for NES/SNES/GB kind of things. However, when I tried to run the PS/N64 Emus, the experience was quite unacceptable. Even the some of the GBA games can not run smoothly (Some audio lag); 2)Most of the game console builds use SPI or TV-out as the display interface. The SPI display will need the CPU to help with the frame buffer driver which will make the game experience worse and the fps is also limited by the speed of SPI clock. And the display quality of TV-out is just not good enough. In this project, I will use the RaspberryPi Compute Module 3 and a DPI interface LCD to build a ultimate RetroPie game console. Detailed instruction of building this console can be found on instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Retro-CM3-a-Powerful-RetroPie-Handled-GAME-Console/