WiFi hacked/baked into PICOPi.

Seems to be working well, and even with the added network/WiFi support, it's still booting up in ~15s, but your mileage may vary. having access to splore from this little handheld is pretty awesome/amazing if you ask me. i thought pulling the card and adding carts was a drag, but that's just me. now it's completely portable and all you need is WiFi and i've just been using my phone as a hotspot.

thank you @paloblancogames for the excellent write-up on getting everything setup,
which is located here: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=35926
you would only need to substitute my .zip file during the setup. there's an empty wpa_supplicant.conf, just add in your WiFi info and it'll be pulled in on boot up. :D

if you already have this setup, you should be able to unzip the picopi0-WiFi-v002.zip located here: https://github.com/itsonlym3/rpi-buildroot/tree/picopi/Compiles over your current install.

i did have some code in there that was moving the files downloaded from the BBS so that they could be loaded from the carts folder the next time you boot up, but didn't figure everyone would want this, so i removed it.

i'd love any feedback anyone might have.

DISCLAIMER: I am NOT responsible for any loss of data, damage to your system or hurt feelers.

Finally! I also tried this but had given up in the meantime. Now I suggest increasing the sharpness of the display as I described in this post.

May I also suggest adding the keywords #hardware and #handheld to your post.

With Picopi now function-complete I made a separate „real“ PICO-8 cart which boots to PICO-8 using picopi. The other uses Recalbox for different handheld systems. This way I can swap carts like on a real Game Boy.

You can buy an additional cart shell for about 15 to 20 €/$.

@pixelpunker nice! i'd actually considered buying a couple of extras myself. yeah, i'll add the tags you suggested. you get a chance to try/test WiFi? i also plan to look into increasing the sharpness you'd posted, I just haven't gotten around to it yet. :/

WOW!!!! Thank you very much! Awesome project.

@pc77 welcome! i hope to continue to work on it and do some serious tweaking, but we'll see how it goes and/or if it gains any traction.

I'm beside myself with excitement about it all. probably would have never gone down this rabbit hole if not for @paloblancogames

Here is the label design I used.

took the liberty of creating another and adding Guillermo to it. :(

@tjbynum wow go it to work! so nice to see my game on the GPi. thanks m8!

on a further note, any ideas how one could access the cart file on the GPi over the network via something like FileZilla?

@Phume awesome! seeing it connect to the BBS and pull carts just makes me smile. as for accessing the GPi via net, etc. is something i'd like to pursue, but it's not going to be easy, at least with my skillset. lol I was also looking at a BT option, but I haven't had time to pursue anything yet, but it's def on my list. glad you got network working on it and thanks for sharing. you just made my day!

@tjbynum Cheers! Yeah I wouldn't know where to start either without it running from recalbox/retropi/rasbian ect.

Feeling motivated though! Working on a 16x16 sprite animation utility for the GPi that doesn't need the mouse,
because it feels so nice on the gpi screen :-D

@Phume w00t! yeah, the filesystem and the way things are set up is going to take some hacking in order to get a shell among other things functioning properly. it'll take some time, but I'll get there. enjoy!

@Phume omg, i just had the best worst idea ever. wonder if i can get something like this to work and then hacked into the build for added RUMBLE....?

Tiny Vibration Motors

@tjbynum wasn`t the cartridge not staying put or something along those lines :-D
haha oh dear..