Welcome to the Crowdsourcing Mornings segment! Every weekday morning, Geek Alabama talks about and features one crowdsourcing project from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and others. The hope with Crowdsourcing Mornings is to feature and help a project be successful and reach its fundraising goal. Please enjoy today’s featured project!
Please read our crowdsourcing guidelines at: https://geekalabama.com/media-kit-pr/geek-alabama-crowdsourcing-guidelines
Introducing the Retro Watch. A passion project 10 years in the making. In the end, all watches are mostly jewelry so looking cool is goal #2…but being a legitimate, powerful, gaming system is really the goal of this project.
Besides its formfactor and custom high resolution display, the feature that really sets this platform apart is the inclusion of an FPGA to create custom video game hardware on the fly. Utilizing custom rendering cores, the “hard parts” of accurate emulation (tricky video and sound timing) can be offloaded from the main CPU, allowing most 8 and 16 bit systems to be emulated with unmatched accuracy and perfect lag free speed.
With am Arm Cortex M33 running at up to 160MHZ + 2 low power cores for Bluetooth and sensors, 1.5MB of fast ram, 8MB of external ram, a dedicated low power 2D graphics processor (and an FPGA we can turn on for heavy gaming) this watch is a lot more than just a watch. It will easily handle just about any DOS era game and has more horse power than the Nintendo64 era systems.
Connect to any smart phone to send and receive messages, interact with applications, and download new apps, games, and updates.
It tells time…for a really long time between charges if you don’t play games on it 😉
As of January 10th, this project has raised $79,000 of their $35,000 goal. This project has 12 days left to raise as much as it can. For a pledge of $10, you will get developer access. For a pledge of $179, you will get one watch. To learn more and to pledge money, go to: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/retrowatch/the-retro-gaming-watch?
