With the 2024 business card contest kicking off, I've finally found an excuse to try a silly project idea I came up with a while ago - making a big-screen compatible retro games emulator by using an RP2040 as a low-cost display adaptor through the PicoDVI library by Wren6991, coupled with a host micro-controller to actually run some emulators, using firmware such as ducalex's Retro-Go.

To keep costs, part-count and board space down, the RP2040 would have the bare minimum of components required to operate - no external flash/RAM, and clocked directly from the host processor. As the RP2040 lacks on-chip flash to store user programs, the host processor will need to upload firmware directly to the RP2040's RAM on startup.

Since this is expected to be plugged into a monitor, having the controller built-in to the PCB wouldn't be particularly practical, so external gamepad support is a must, and we'd need audio too, of course.

To meet the competition requirements, this will need to fit on a small business-card sized PCB, and with a bonus category to make the product as thin and business-card like as possible, I get to try out some unusual workarounds to avoid using bulky components like connectors.

So in the two months the competition runs for:

- The PCB will need to be designed, manufactured and assembled

- Software will need to be written/adapted and *debugged* for both the host MCU and the RP2040

- Everything needs to be written up in a somewhat-orderly fashion

...which sounds an awful lot for such a short timescale...