DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Disks

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 …. DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Disks. 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. Unlike some cartridge projects we’ve seen that merely queue up the games, the CDs on this one actually do seem to store the ROM file, along with a shell script to put it in the correct emulator’s library. We might have gone with autorun, but it’s [Emmet]’s console and he’s got it working how he likes.