The Uzebox is a retro-minimalist

Minimalism

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...

 open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 video game console

Video game console

A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...

 design. It is based on an AVR

Atmel AVR

The AVR is a modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC single chip microcontroller which was developed by Atmel in 1996. The AVR was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other...

 8-bit general-purpose microcontroller

Microcontroller

A microcontroller is a small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip, as well as a typically small amount of RAM...

 made by Atmel

Atmel

Atmel Corporation is a manufacturer of semiconductors, founded in 1984. Its focus is on system-level solutions built around flash microcontrollers...

. The particularity of the system is that it uses an interrupt-driven kernel and has no frame buffer. Functions such as video sync generation, tile rendering, and music mixing is done realtime by a background task so games can easily be developed in C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

. The design goal was to be as simple as possible yet have good enough sound and graphics while leaving enough resources to implement interesting games. Emphasis was put on making it easy and fun to assemble and program for any hobbyists. The final design contains only two chips: an ATmega644 and an AD725 RGB-to-NTSC

NTSC

NTSC, named for the National Television System Committee, is the analog television system that is used in most of North America, most of South America , Burma, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and some Pacific island nations and territories .Most countries using the NTSC standard, as...

/PAL

PAL

PAL, short for Phase Alternating Line, is an analogue television colour encoding system used in broadcast television systems in many countries. Other common analogue television systems are NTSC and SECAM. This page primarily discusses the PAL colour encoding system...

 encoder.

The Uzebox was listed in Make Magazine

Make (magazine)

Make is an American quarterly magazine published by O'Reilly Media which focuses on do it yourself and/or DIWO projects involving computers, electronics, robotics, metalworking, woodworking and other disciplines...

's definitive open source hardware

Open source hardware

Open source hardware consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered in the same manner as free and open source software . Open source hardware is part of the open source culture movement and applies a like concept to a variety of components. The term usually means that...

 projects of 2009 .

Features

• Low parts count and cost: The system is made of only two chips and discrete components.
• Interrupt-driven kernel: No cycle counting required, sound mixing and video generation are all made in the background.
• 256 simultaneous colors: Accomplished by using a R-2R resistor ladder DAC.
• 4 channels sound engine: The sound subsystem is composed of 3 wavetable channels and 1 noise or PCM channel.
• MIDI In: With a music sequencer, allows the creation of music directly on the console.
• Retro controllers: The joypad inputs uses standard NES
  Nintendo Entertainment System
  The Nintendo Entertainment System is an 8-bit video game console that was released by Nintendo in North America during 1985, in Europe during 1986 and Australia in 1987...
  
  /SNES
  Super Nintendo Entertainment System
  The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is a 16-bit video game console that was released by Nintendo in North America, Europe, Australasia , and South America between 1990 and 1993. In Japan and Southeast Asia, the system is called the , or SFC for short...
  
   controllers interface.
• SNES Mouse Support.
• SD/MicroSD card interface.
• Expandable: I/O lines and peripherals are still available, like the UART and SPI port for one to experiment.
• Emulator: A fully cycle-perfect, emulator greatly eases development.
• Gameloader (beta): Load and flash games stored on SD cards.
• API: Develop games using an API that provides multiple video modes, sound driver and more.
• Open source: The software and hardware design are totally free and licensed under the GPL.

Hardware Specifications

• CPU: ATmega644 microcontroller
• Total RAM
  Ram
  -Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
  
  : 4K
• Program Memory: 64K
• Speed: 28.61818 MHz (Overclocked)
• Colors: 256 simultaneous colors arranged in a 3:3:2 color space (Red:3 bits, Green:3 bits, Blue: 2 bits)
• Video output: NTSC
  NTSC
  NTSC, named for the National Television System Committee, is the analog television system that is used in most of North America, most of South America , Burma, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and some Pacific island nations and territories .Most countries using the NTSC standard, as...
  
   Composite and S-Video
  S-Video
  Separate Video, more commonly known as S-Video and Y/C, is often referred to by JVC as both an S-VHS connector and as Super Video. It is an analog video transmission scheme, in which video information is encoded on two channels: luma and chroma...
  
  
• Sound: 8-bit mono, mixed at ~15 KHz and output via PWM
• Inputs: Two NES/SNES compatible joypad inputs
• External storage: SD/MicroSD
• Options: MIDI-in interface

Implementations

As of 2010, the Uzebox design has been commercially implemented by the Uzebox AVCore, a fully assembled unit. In 2011 two further Do-It-Yourself kits released - the Uzebox DIY kit and the EUzebox DIY kit with SCART output for the european market .