This tiny, open-source Game Boy lookalike has started shipping

The Arduboy looks like a tiny knockoff Game Boy — and in a lot of ways, that's exactly what it is. Funded on Kickstarter last year, the Arduboy promised to let owners create and play their own games and install new games built by the community. And now one year later, it's been shipping to backers over the past several months, and there are videos of it in action up on YouTube.

Featuring a whopping 2.5KB of RAM

The Arduboy is far from high-tech, but its tiny size, basic specs, and throwback style are part of what makes it so appealing. It has a 1.3-inch OLED display, stereo speakers, and six buttons. Inside, there's 32KB of storage, 2.5KB of RAM, and a 180 mAh rechargeable battery that's supposed to last through eight hours of gameplay. It's built on top of Arduino, so the platform should be accessible to a large base of developers (and to those just getting started). The device is on sale for $39, though if you buy it now, you'll have to wait until every Kickstarter reward has been shipped out.

It looks like there are only a few dozen games for Arduboy so far. A lot of those are — like the Arduboy itself — knockoffs of gaming classics. Here's someone showing Arduventure, which looks a lot like Pokemon:

And here's a clone of the (somewhat less classic) Super Crate Box, called Epic Crates of Mass Destruction:

• ViaPyra
• SourceArduboy