I was organising a shelf earlier and then found this little fella hiding out there;



It's a Retroflag GPi Case that I put together a few years ago.

Of course, it's just my luck that I found it again right after updating the hardware photo on my GOL profile-page - I'll have to do something about that temporarily until I properly update it again, because I'm not re-taking the whole thing right now.



If you're not familiar with it, the GPi Case is a handheld shell styled after the original Game Boy, but with two extra face-buttons and added "shoulder" buttons on the back, and a 2.8" 320x240 TFT display, along with support for running from a 2.5x0.7mm USB-to-DC cable or 3 AA batteries. It has a "cartridge" in the back into which you fit a Raspberry Pi Zero or Zero W using pogo pins, and through which you can access the microSD Card where the Link Cable port would be on a real Game Boy - complete with a little built-in rubber cover that resembles the often-lost plastic one on the original hardware. There was a later revision that beefed all of this up, too; That one has a 3" 640x480 IPS display and a 2800mAh lithium-ion battery instead.

Anyway, having found it and happily welcomed it back into my collection of Linux handhelds, and having finally given it a hostname of its own (it's now dream-land, named after the country from Kirby's Dream Land, one of my favourite Game Boy games), I figured that it was about time to give it a refresh - and what luck! It turns out that there's now an up-to-date community-made RetroPie image for both versions of the GPi Case, called GPi Zero/GPi Zero 2. It's by a chap called Sliver X, and it only includes support for emulated systems that work well on the Raspberry Pi Zero line, along with other tweaks that weren't available before, such as granting the user access to changing the speed of the SD Card reader to suit what they're using.

It's SO much nicer than the original setup I had on there, which was basically a plain un-tweaked Raspberry Pi Zero RetroPie image, plus a script provided by Retroflag to enable a safe-shutdown feature when you flip the power-switch on the GPi Case. The new GPi Zero RetroPie doesn't require anywhere near as much fuss and includes the safe-shutdown script by default - and it seems to boot and shut down much quicker, too.

If you've got one of these hanging around, it's worth dusting it off and giving it an update with this. The community disk-image really makes it shine.

Last edited by Pengling on 29 January 2024 at 9:26 pm UTC