How hard would it be to "make" an LT?

[soop]

Just get the cheapest core unit you can and fix an LCD to it?  Also, I wonder how much power a core unit draws?  Might be able to battery-power it.

*edit* In fact, by the power supply, we know that it's 9v and less than 1000mAh.  And todays LCDs will draw far less power than the old ones.

*edit 2* Ok, 2 things; firstly, the old screen is 4 inches, but it obviously has a large bezel.  The second thing is, screens nowadays are all widescreen.  So I think the best screen to use would be a gamecube/PSOne 5" screen.  Of course actually attaching it and fitting it into a "lid" is another matter.

[Tatsujin]

Easily said, it all depends all on which parts you will use. A possible selfmade LT can be between 40 and few 100 bucks. And yeah, batt operation woulnd't be much of a prob today.

[soop]

Damn, I'm really tempted by this.  I might get one of those Gamecube screens.

[hoobs88]

This forum member made his own portable system.

http://moddedbybacteria.wordpress.com/multi-platform-console-system-projects/turbografx-pce-hucard-console-intografx/

[thesteve]

sweet

[jperryss]

This forum member made his own portable system.

http://moddedbybacteria.wordpress.com/multi-platform-console-system-projects/turbografx-pce-hucard-console-intografx/

Yep, and with a full-sized TG to boot. I imagine you could go even smaller/lighter with a PCE or CG.

[soop]

also, for some reason a PCE is about half the weight of a Core Grafx.  And since I can't use it without an adaptor, I might use mine.

[Vecanti]

Might be cool to find an old CD-Rom shell and mod that.  Put the LCD screen in there and make it open and close to reveal the LCD screen.  Put it in to a suite case with a core unit.   In the big grey back part of the suite case where the units connect maybe you could fill all that space with with batteries.




Instead of a CD unit a screen pops out...



Another angle, sorry for the weak photoshop skills... lid is sort of missing, but you get the idea,



Screen folds away when done to look like a normal CD unit...

[soop]

that's actually a pretty good idea!

[thesteve]

i had a Pentium 100 laptop running magic engine

[tru]

What would be really awesome is a potable PCE CD Rom... the portable PCE/TG16 has been done already... its called the TGExpress/PCGT... make a cdrom portable and then we'll talk...

Still much better than what I could do though...

[soop]

The big drawback of the CD ROM is battery.  Having a physical motor spinning constantly will drain battery quickly.

I have a 3.5" screen coming that I was going to put into my Nomad, but I might play about with it in a PCE first.  My main concern is a workable hinge, which the Gamecube screen would solve, but the gamecube is slightly bigger than a PCE so it may not work well.

[Vecanti]

The big drawback of the CD ROM is battery.  Having a physical motor spinning constantly will drain battery quickly.

I don't know, I use to have a CD walkman that ran for 9+ hours on two AA bateries.  LCD screens however would suck two AA down pretty fast.  The PCE cd-rom probably take more power, but it might not necessarily be that much of an issue.

[soop]

The main difference would be in the amount of buffer needed to store data.  In the case of a PCE, that's next to zero, which is fine for a home console, but for a portable, it would last about an hour on batteries, without everything else combined.

For a modern(ish) discman, or minidisc, most of the data is stored in RAM, but with a 1x CD ROM, it's going to constantly have a motor spinning, which is more power than solid state or a new LCD.  And LCDs aren't tha bad either, AAIK, it's the backlighting that kills.

[thesteve]

make a drive interface with buffering and solve that