Hi,

The last couple of days I've been playing around with making a little 'gaming console' with an ATtiny and a 8x8 led matrix. So far so good, this is what I have:



Hardware wise it's really simple, an ATTiny84, 6 buttons and a HT16K33 based led matrix controller (on a Adafruit breakout board) and the led matrix itself.

As you can see I quickly made a simple tetris game for it, kind of fun already
Next up is making a nice case for it so it looks a bit decent. The whole thing is powered with an external usb battery pack and I don't think I'll be changing that.

This is very nice indeed! What language was the ATTiny programmed in?

At the moment I'm programming it in processing (well actually just C++ if you ask me) using the Arduino IDE. But I'm setting up Eclipse to work better. I wrote a little display and button library so that I can easily make 'apps' for it.

Fantastic. Have you made any other games aside from tetris?

Nope. I build the circuit yesterday and programmed tetris today. So didn't have the time yet. I plan on making more though.

Cool. What do you have in mind?

Given the screen size you could probably do some sort of shoot 'em' up or space invaders clone.

I was thinking of a small racing game and indeed some kind of shoot 'em' up. Depends how much I can push into this device. Beside games I'd also like to make a little drawing program on it that stores the the EEPROM. Would be fun. But yeah it also depends on how much I can store on my device. Currently I'm using 3750 bytes for everything, total I can use is 8192 bytes.

Do you feel there is any room to increase the efficiency of the programming to get a few more bytes to work with?

Well, I've been trying to optimise as much as possible, hence I threw away the Adafruit library for the display and wrote my own tiny one with just the stuff in that I need. So I'm doing my best to keep the size down

I'm impressed that you built what appears to be a quite full-featured Tetris game that fast. Very nice job on the hardware too, obviously. I assume you have point-to-point jumpers on the backside of that perfboard? Do you plan to make a custom PCB for it at some point?

This is cool. Any thought about sound output?

A year ago I did a similar thing with an Attiny2313 and had a ton of fun.

I got everything to fit by carefully writing in assembly. But using the Arduino IDE would've been a lot less painful.

Looking forward to seeing the games you write for your device.

Thanks! Well at the moment the tetris game doesn't support losing yet (doesn't do anything when you reach the top) and there is no score. But the game 'physics' are in it, so I'm already very happy with that

On the back I'm using hard electronic wire for the connections, it doesn't look really pretty But it does the job. I'm planning on making a PCB in the future, I've used the toner transfer method once and it worked great.



Ah, your project looks great too!
I've been thinking of adding sound support, but I'm not sure, maybe I'll wait for when I switch over to a real PCB. There is still a PMW port free on the ATtiny that I could use for that.

Also as you can see, there are some headers on the perfboard. Those are for reprogramming the device in circuit. Gotta love AVR for that