Some projects I do aren’t months of research and weeks of dragging my feet before making a purchase, sometimes they just scratch the right nostalgia portions of my brain and I go for a fun kit. That’s what I did here with the FreePlay CM3 kit. Based on the raspberry pi’s retro pi software the FreePlay CM3 provides an easy portable solution with a version of the raspberry pi, battery, controls, and display all closed inside an old Nintendo Game Boy Advance case. With the basic buttons you can play most game boy games of any generation, SNES, and old Atari games. With an add on giving a second set of trigger buttons as well as joysticks all PlayStation 1 games are available to play as well.
A quick browse through the installation instructions showed that the process can be done by gutting the inside of a true Gameboy Advance to allow for the hard drive and larger display to fit inside, usually takes about an hour and a lot of filing down parts of plastic. Alternatively I saw another site that makes aluminum milled shells that are already trimmed to fit the modified parts. Given the thought of a better weighted Gameboy I went for the aluminum parts. After receiving all the parts in the mail it was time for assembly!
The instructions were simple enough on the Freeplay sight to both assemble the parts and install the software. This version of the raspberry pi (The CM3) has the same power as the standard pi (without wifi or bluetooth add ons) all inside a standard ram module so it’s easy to integrate with other custom systems like this one. The software could (just like any other pi) be flashed onto an SD card and integrated through the Freeplay board. Once that was setup the process to add games was a couple extra instructions away and I was able to replay all my classic favorites on a bigger blacklight screen.
