DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Disks

What happened

DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Disks, according to Hackaday. Optical media may be dead for video games on the big corporate consoles, but not in [Emmet]’s heart– or on his DIY game console , that he built specifically to use optical media. Not fancy blu-ray or newfangled DVDs, either, but good old fashioned CDs from the Orange Book.

Yeah, he’s not fitting modern AAA flagship games on those disks, but the Intel N150 on the single board computer he’s using isn’t going to power through them, either. That’s fine, though, because there are literally decades of content this machine can handle.

That’s why the board is running Batocera , which is a Linux distro tailor-made for retrogaming on x86– and also ARM, but that’s not important here. He’s using ESP32-S3s to run custom wireless gamepads with BLE, which means he’s got more power in each of them than some of the retro consoles this machine is emulating, but it gets the job done.