“Got this as a present (probably from Pimoroni, as I'm in the UK and have praised their cases and customer support with gifting family before!), and have had a blast with it. Felt I had to write a review! The programming style and libraries are amazing, it's just the right level of simple but "close-to-the-bone" programming. The build is great, the design is lovely, and (like a Pi) has all the right compromises to make it smooth all round!
I've make a Pi arcade stick thing, but this is more my style for making games on, as the simple graphics and sound suit a one-man play around with quick results: also easy to show friends!
Recommend for anyone, even if just to play some of the amazing games others have made, but particularly for learning.”
“Ive made a few mini consoles joybonnet pi zero, picade and a few psp hacks and builds and i must say this is an amazing little bit of kit shame we cant buy the pocketchip from a uk seller as i would have the two of them linked up in a flash.
I have been using this more and more every day as i can keep it in a credit card holder and play anywhere.
Its nice to have something built for me for once that works out of the box now im going to give game design a go now”
“For a while now I have wanted to do a little game development but not really had the time. My games end up being massive projects that spiral out of control. The Arduboy fixes my game development urge while keeping things small and manageable thanks the the physical limitations of the device.
Its a really well built product with a friendly and helpful community that were happy to help me get started.
I Managed to knock out a clone of snake in a couple of hours and was pleased with what I had achieved.”
“It might have some problems, the speaker sound really bad, the display has that problem where too many horizontal pixel in the same state affect the nearby pixels (example: if you draw a line box there are 4 visible ghosting points), it might die due a bad upload (the icsp is really inconvenient to wire in case you need to repair it) however...
The community is awesome, the support, the learning possibilities, everything worth the price. It is just a lovely device overall. Start dreaming a game you could code in this limited device, nothing will feel that far to be done.”
“As a tool to learn programming, and microcontrollers in general, it's fantastic - graphics, sound, simple input, and most of all, sensible limits. It also attracts a lot of attention, such a desirable little item. Unfortunately as a games machine, it's not that fantastic. The screen has this annoying bright-line-next-to-black-dots problem, which, as i understand, is a limitation of its technology, but still, it looks like a faulty panel to those not aware of the issue. Also, at least on my unit, the buttons don't register when they "click", you have to push them just a little bit further, and that's very annoying. My button 1 tends to get "stuck" in a depressed state. It still works, and it may be just a faulty unit, but it feels a little cheap as a result. I don't regret the purchase, but i expected the quality to be a little better.”
“This is a really well-engineered little retro game console with the added bonus of being an open Arduino-based system. The community around it is helpful, polite and there are many addictive games available almost all with their source code on github. If you are not interested in learning about Arduino or programming then there are already two simple to use game loaders that can be used to put games onto the system without having to use the Arduino IDE. Superb!”
“Fun and educational. I am learning how to code games and also can download them from the community website. I take it to school everyone loves it, especially the computing teacher, she has bought her own!”
