Maker Jason Carlson not only remade the Intellivision game Treasure of Tarmin, also known simply as ‘Minotaur’, but he also created a wooden Arduino handheld console to play it on.
The hardware here is centred around around an Arduino Mega clone, the Meduino, which was used for its smaller footprint and memory capacity.
Connected to that are three buttons (A, B and reset), a 5-way joystick, a power switch and a speaker. There’s also a small rumble motor for feedback.
Display is handled by a 1.8″ screen and and a 2XAA battery holder from a Yamaha guitar provides power.
While the physical part of the project is great, and anything with woodgrain gets bonus points in our books, the software is just as impressive.
Carlson put in a lot of work recreating the game and had to make special concessions for the limits of the Arduino. All of the 576 rooms, for example, had to be manually encoded wall by wall to fit into the memory.
Some parts of the game were left out for the sake of simplicity, but there were new additions to make the experience better. Carlson points out that he reworked the interface and added a handy map system.
You can find the code for this project over on GitHub and we suggest giving the accompanying video a watch for a short explainer and a demo of the game.
[h/t – hackster.io blog]
