Flip the power switch and a familiar blue screen fades in, cursor blinking, ready for a line of BASIC or a cartridge-era game. Except this Commodore 64 fits in two hands and rides along on a USB battery bank. YouTuber Retro Dad built it to carry the best-selling computer model of all time out of the den and onto the couch, the bus, or anywhere a retro itch strikes.
What Retro Dad actually built
The heart of the handheld is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B running the VICE emulator, set to boot straight to that blue C64 screen. A physical keyboard salvaged from an Xbox Chatpad sits below a small HDMI display, and a speaker paired with an amplifier module handles the chiptunes. Real 9-pin joystick ports hang off the side so vintage controllers still plug in the way they did back in 1985. The whole thing is open source: printable case files, wiring diagrams, custom firmware, and a full build guide.
How the pieces come together
The clever bit is the joystick wiring. Those 9-pin D-sub connectors vanished from computers decades ago, and the Pi has no idea what to do with their raw signals. Retro Dad dropped in a Raspberry Pi Pico as a translator, reading the joystick lines and handing the Pi something it understands over USB. Skip the external stick and a salvaged D-pad and buttons from a USB controller take over instead. Because nearly every part is an off-the-shelf module, the handheld goes together without touching a soldering iron, though that convenience makes it a chunky device. The Chatpad's own wireless dongle keeps the keyboard talking to the Pi.
The takeaway
An Arm chip will never be a 6502, so none of this is original silicon, but VICE gets close enough that the blinking cursor feels honest. For a student, it is a tidy lesson in how emulation, a microcontroller bridge, and salvaged parts can rebuild a 40-year-old machine for a fraction of what a real C64 costs today. The full parts list, STL files, and firmware live on the project write-up and its linked GitHub repository. Grab a Pi 3, a Pico, and a spare weekend, and you can boot to blue by Sunday night.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
Top comments (0)