gamebub

Game Bub is an open-source FPGA retro emulation handheld, with support for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games.

You can buy your own, prebuilt Game Bub from Crowd Supply!

You can find the user guide and documentation here.

Want to chat about Game Bub? Feel free to join the Discord.

Check out the announcement blog post for an in-depth look at the development process!

Features

• Play physical Game Boy / Color / Advance cartridges
• Load and play ROM files from a microSD card (with built-in support for rumble, clock, accelerometer, gyroscope)
• Multiplayer link cable functionality
• Custom, from-scratch Game Boy and Game Boy Advance FPGA cores with great game compatibility
• 14+ hour battery life
• Video output to TV or monitor via Game Bub Dock
• Extensible hardware, designed for future improvements

Building

Building a Game Bub handheld requires manufacturing PCBs, 3D printing the shell and buttons, and assembling components from a variety of sources. For information on manufacturing and assembling your own, see here. Note that this information is for the older, vertical revision 2. Updated building information will be available in the Game Bub Docs soon.

For other inquiries, contact us at support@gamebub.net.

Architecture

For an in-depth description of the project architecture, as of revision 2, see here.

The Game Bub handheld consists of a Xilinx XC7A100T FPGA to do the main emulation and I/O, and an ESP32-S3 microcontroller to do auxiliary tasks (configuring the FPGA, rendering the UI, loading ROM files from a microSD card and sending it to the FPGA).

Directory Structure

• fpga: FPGA source code (HDL), written in Chisel
• firmware: Microcontroller firmware

License

Unless otherwise specified:

• Firmware (in firmware/) and scripts (in scripts/) are licensed under GPLv3 (GPL-3.0-only).
• FPGA source code (in fpga/) is licensed under the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal (CERN-OHL-S-2.0)
• PCB (schematic and layout), mechanical, and hardware design files are licensed under the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal (CERN-OHL-S-2.0)

At a high level, this means that you can copy, share, and modify the source code, as long as you provide proper attribution and share your source code / design files with the same license. However, the "Game Bub" name and logo are trademarked, and you may not use them for your product without permission.