Just when we thought we’ve seen a Raspberry Pi emulator stuffed into every kind of portable you can think of, the maker community surprises again.

sudomod user Kite has turned the strange Dreamcast VMU into a portable emulator using a Pi Zero W and a lot of clever space management.

Things are tight inside of the original case which needed to be trimmed down with a knife to fit everything in. Even the tiny Pi was cut down with several ports being removed completely and the big capacitors replaced with smaller versions.

This was all done to fit in a 850mAh battery which gives you around four hours of playtime on the 128×128 LCD screen. The software playing the games is, of course, RetroPie. The text in the menus is a bit hard to read and things look blurry at this size, but Kite says a better screen will fix that.



Another addition to come at a later date is two extra buttons. These will take the functionality of the Start/Select so Sleep/Mode can be used as traditional face buttons.

But right now the existing buttons are enough to play games such as Pokémon and Sonic, as seen in the video above.

The final feather in this project’s cap is the clever use of the top section. With the original VMU the top would be popped off exposing pins to connect it to the Dreamcast controller.

Here, however, taking off the top gives you access to the SD card, power buttons, and the USB port for charging.

make sure you check out the forum post for the project for more details about how it was made.

[Via – Hackster.io Blog