Over the last decade, the Arduboy, a card-sized gaming handheld, has slowly turned into a vibrant open-source 8-bit game platform, with hundreds of community-developed original games available for it. Despite its tiny screen and severely underpowered hardware, it’s managed to establish itself as a legitimate on-the-go entertainment option for retro gaming fans. The Arduboy FX-C is the latest iteration of the card-sized game system.
Like its predecessors, the gaming handheld has slim, compact dimensions, allowing you to slide it into any pocket. Heck, its slim enough you might even fit it inside a card slot on a wallet, provided your wallet isn’t too crowded.
The Arduboy FX-C has a GameBoy-style layout with a small screen on top, along with a D-pad and two action buttons below it. While that seems sparse, that goes completely with the device’s design ethos, which positions it as a barebones, minimalist game system. The screen is a 1.3-inch OLED that only displays monochrome images (white on black), so it’s very limited on what it can show onscreen. That’s right, it doesn’t even do grayscale. As such, the game visuals usually rely on visual effects like flickering and dithering to change up the way things look, making it feel like a genuine vintage gaming hardware.
Inside the housing, it feels just as barebones. The device is powered by an ATmega32u4 processor with 2.5KB of DDR3 RAM and 16MB of built-in storage. Seriously, those are specs that feel straight out of a pre-2000s game console, rather than a modern machine. The simple specs, though, have not been a hindrance. For a lot of indie devs, in fact, it’s a huge part of the overall appeal, as it forces devs to be more creative to implement more complex gameplay processes. It hasn’t hurt the dev community, either, with the platform currently having hundreds of games available on the Arduboy forums.
The Arduboy FX-C doesn’t have an SD card slot for loading games. Instead, it comes with 300 of the most popular games for the platform preinstalled, so you can just start playing as soon as you take it out of the box. What kind of games do you get? Well, these are all legal titles, so you don’t get any popular ROMs or vintage game ports. Instead, they offer either original games or indie knockoffs of popular retro titles, such as Castleboy (Castlevania clone), Ardulem (Lemmings clone), or Prince of Arabia (Prince of Persia cone). Anyway, the games are surprisingly varied, with puzzles, side-scrollers, platformers, shooters, dungeon crawlers, racing games, simulations, and more. While we don’t know which games come preloaded, it’s worth noting that some games on the forum are demo-only, so hopefully there’s not much of that in the curated bundle they’re putting in.
The gaming handheld has no wireless connectivity, by the way, so you can’t connect it to the internet, use it with a Bluetooth controller, or do online multiplayer. They do offer wired multiplayer over the device’s USB-C port, provided you use a compatible cable (either USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt cable). And yes, the whole thing is open-source, so you can write and run custom code on this thing, if you’re into that.
The Arduboy FX-C is available now.