Unlike the other machines in this section, the Arduboy really does exist. It is a credit-card sized open source handheld console, designed by Kevin Bates, funded by a crowdfunding campaign in 2015 and shipped from 2016 onwards. Recalbox files it under fantasy consoles because it shares their spirit: deliberately tiny hardware, a homebrew scene that produces the entire library, and games distributed freely as plain files.
Under the hood it is an Arduino board: an Atmel ATmega32U4 microcontroller clocked at 16 MHz, 32 KB of flash memory for the game and a mere 2.5 KB of RAM. The screen is a small 128 × 64 pixel monochrome OLED: no colours, no grey levels, each pixel is either on or off. Sound comes out of a two-channel piezo buzzer, and the controls amount to a D-pad and two buttons.
Those extreme constraints are exactly what made the machine popular among developers: an Arduboy game is a compiled Arduino sketch, written in C++ with the official library, and hundreds of titles — platformers, puzzles, shoot'em ups, roguelikes — are published free of charge by the community.
| Type | Open source handheld console |
| Author | Kevin Bates |
| Release year | 2016 |
| CPU | Atmel ATmega32U4 @ 16 MHz |
| Memory | 32 KB flash, 2.5 KB RAM |
| Screen | 128 × 64 pixel monochrome OLED |
| Sound | piezo buzzer, 2 channels |
| Controls | D-pad + 2 buttons |
| Controller | Mandatory |
📷 Screenshot coming soon:
system-arduboy.png
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro arduous | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
The system relies on a single emulator, Libretro arduous, available on every board. Netplay is not available on this system. RetroAchievements and CRT output are supported.
No BIOS is required for this system.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/arduboy/
Accepted extensions: .hex, .zip, .7z
An Arduboy game is a .hex file: the compiled Arduino sketch, the very same one that gets uploaded to the physical console. Community titles can be downloaded from the Arduboy game repositories, free of charge and with their source code.
The picture is pure black and white, with no grey levels: this is the machine's normal behaviour, not a display glitch. A shader or an overlay suited to monochrome screens often makes the result nicer to look at on a large display.