CROWDFUNDING NEWS – A high tech retro gaming watch is on Kickstarter.
The overachiever developer, Jason Rogers, crossed paths with the developer of the Pebble Watch, thought, planned and is about to produce a retro gaming watch with smartwatch features.
This guy was a naval submarine officer, and has degrees in physics, nuclear engineering, computer science, and a masters in electrical engineering. He spent 3 years as a project manager and firmware architect for a large scale controls company that did in-house design and manufacturing before moving on to be an embedded systems engineer in Amazon’s Kuiper satellite program. If he had only applied himself…
The watch will have a “custom high-resolution display, and an FPGA (Field-programmable gate array) to create custom video game hardware on the fly. Utilizing custom rendering cores, the “hard parts” of accurate emulation (tricky video and sound timing) can be offloaded from the main CPU, allowing most 8 and 16 bit systems to be emulated with unmatched accuracy and perfect lag free speed.
With an Arm Cortex M33 running at up to 160MHZ + 2 low power cores for Bluetooth and sensors, 1.5MB of fast RAM, 8MB of external RAM, a dedicated low power 2D graphics processor (and an FPGA we can turn on for heavy gaming) this watch is a lot more than just a watch. It will easily handle almost any DOS-era game and has more horsepower than the Nintendo64-era systems.
Tech Specs (directly quoted)
- The main processor: Renesas / Dialog DA14706 with 1.5MB of internal ram, 8MB of external QSPI Ram, ARM-M33 application processor at a scalable speed of 32Khz to 160Mhz, dual ARM M0 processors for handling sensors and BLE, 2D GPU that supports most bit blit operations. 3 high speed Flash/ram qspi interfaces for fpga interconnect, memory mapped psram, and flash. This CPU was made for this!
- Efinix T20 FPGA with ~20Kb logic elements and ~1000Kb of ram…more than enough to match any 16 bit console in the 90s and maybe even push us to the first 3D generation.
- Magnetometer, accelerometer, audio amplifier + speaker (mono), notification buzzer, light sensor, custom 60Hz 320×320 pixel LCD for gaming (1.54″, I know…its small…but come on, its a watch!), external display for watch functions…like telling time! 4 action buttons + dpad
- Some optional items we are considering but really depends on scale of our sales: Heart Rate Monitor, micro SD card, camera, shoulder buttons
As of this writing over $26000 of the $35000 goal has been reached. There are 26 days left in the campaign.
The watch requires a pledge of $159 during the early support period and there are lower levels of support for those that just want to help the developer or want to develop games for it.
See the full details at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/retrowatch/the-retro-gaming-watch
