RISCBoy

RISCBoy is an open-source portable game console built entirely from scratch, including its own custom processor, graphics hardware, and printed circuit board design. The creator describes it as a version of a Game Boy Advance imagined for a world where the RISC-V processor design existed decades earlier, built as a personal tribute to the handheld consoles of their childhood.

At the heart of the project is a custom processor compatible with the RISC-V RV32IMC instruction set, along with a graphics pipeline for drawing images to a screen, and supporting hardware such as memory controllers and basic input and output connections. All of this hardware is described in Verilog, a language used to design digital circuits, and is built to fit onto a specific budget FPGA chip, a type of reconfigurable hardware, with a fairly limited amount of logic capacity. The processor has been checked against official RISC-V compliance tests and additional verification tools to confirm it behaves correctly.

Building and testing RISCBoy is a multi-step hardware development process rather than a simple software install. It requires cloning the repository along with its linked sub-projects, building a specialized compiler toolchain for the RISC-V instruction set, and using open-source chip design tools to turn the Verilog design into a file that can be loaded onto an FPGA board. The README also documents the printed circuit board design, including a real revision of the board that can be manufactured through a low-cost prototyping service, and it notes that a redesigned version is planned once the underlying processor and startup software are more mature.

This project is aimed at people with a background in digital hardware design or embedded systems who want to explore or extend a complete, working custom computer built from first principles, not those looking for a plug-and-play emulator or ready-to-play device.