Forum regulars who had sold and played the GP32 and GP2X decided those machines left too much on the table, so Craig Rothwell, Fatih Kilic, Michael Mrozek (known as EvilDragon), and Michael Weston started sketching a successor, called Pandora, that mixed a proper Linux desktop with real game controls. Dave Cancilier shaped the clamshell case and keymat.
Sinclair shipped the ZX81 in 1981 with a Z80, an 8K ROM, and one kilobyte of static RAM. After the screen buffer and system variables took their share, a BASIC listing had only a few hundred bytes left to stand in. A black plastic box that slid onto the rear edge connector promised sixteen times that space. For a lot of first-time owners, that pack was the line between a curiosity and a machine you could actually write on.
Nick Alvarez, the electrical engineer and maker who posts as NickBuilds and Nickbuildstuff, decided a regular Game Boy Color was too small for what he had in mind. He built one that stands ten feet tall and still accepts button presses, volume twists, and game input the way the 1998 original did.
Super Buzzy Yoshi released Super Mario World Remastered for PC this week as a custom campaign inside Super Mario Bros. X2. You install SMBX2 Beta 5 Patch 4 first, drop the project folder into the worlds directory, then pick the campaign from the list on the left side of the screen. The entire adventure runs through the fan engine, thus no standalone executable or ROM file is required.
BLAVOR squeezed a 20,000mAh cell, four built-in cables, a Qi pad, a solar slab, and a pair of lights into an orange ABS-and-PC shell that weighs about 1.7 pounds. You clip the included carabiner to a pack strap and the whole solar charger power bank, priced at $39.94 (was $57), hangs there like extra camp gear instead of another loose brick in the bottom of a bag. Ports sit under silicone flaps, the body is rated IPX5, and the company lists overcharge, over-discharge, over-current, and short-circuit protection so the pack is meant to live in damp weather rather than on a nightstand.