You’ve got a lot of options when it comes to making a Raspberry Pi emulator with more inventive variations seemingly coming out every day.

Christian Reinbacher created his emulator with a very specific set of requirements. It needed to use a Raspberry Pi 3, have a five inch (or larger) display, and accommodate a 4500 mAh battery from an old Nexus 7 tablet.

All standard stuff until you get to the controls. Perhaps inspired by the Nintendo Switch, Reinbacher wanted a removable controller, specifically the 8Bitdo ZERO.

With all that in mind he modelled a case with a similar design to the original Game Boy, with a dedicated slot for the controller. This case can be found on Thingiverse and it’s suggested that you print “controllertest.stl” first to make sure the larger case can house the controller.

Aside from the components mentioned above this project made use of the excellent PiGRRL 2 guide from Adafruit for most of the wiring and component choices.

Because of this the screen, amplifier, speaker and power booster are all from Adafruit. Very handy if you want to do all your shopping in one place. The full list of components is also available in the Thingiverse link above.

A big thanks to Reinbacher for sending us the images on this page as well as brief explanation on how it was made. He does add a final warning that the USB ports are not accessible, the HDMI output is occupied by the screen, and the headphone output is connected to the amplifier.

If you’re inspired to make an emulator yourself, check out the Dreamcast VMU or the GameCube Classic Mini for more unique ideas.