Hello world,

I was born in the 80s, raised by a Gameboy, CPC and SNES, and had two watch games (Mario Bros. 3 and Tetris). Oh, great times. Gameboys where not allowed at school, but who knew a watch could be used to play...

Later I gave the Tetris watch away, regretting it now, and the Display of the other stopped working. Same with my Casio WQV3 camera-watch. While being careful with my watches, I just seem to fry the displays for some reason ;-)


I have just received a Mario Bros. 3 today, via ebay, just a missing clasp - but as I have the same laying around I am sure I can get it fixed ;-) (Any advice on how to easily switch the straps or clasp?)

I can not understand why no game watches are made today.
With great pleasure I notice more and more "smart" watches hitting the market, I even tried a phone watch a few years back, but it lacked of any possibility to add software (No Java, no apps) and the battery run-time was horrible. More recent Android watches seem promising, but the power consumption and the high price tag are the downsides. I wonder if they would be able to run a NES/SNES emulator with such a small display...

I have recently ordered a ICStation ICWatch, it is a DIY watch based on a small OLED Display and an Atmega328, Arduino-compatible. I love the idea of making my own game-watch.
The power consumption is a bit high though.

OLED is interesting but due to the light emitting nature the stand by (As in: showing the time) power consumption is not that great. Sadly it seems to be expensive to get a custom LCDisplay made, and difficult to make one (Though there are two tutorials for that).
I will probably settle on a Nokia 5510 type LCD, 84x48 Pixel. Several DIY watches use this display as it is widely available and much cheaper then the Sharp Memory LCD.

TL;DR: Hi. I like game watches and want to make one. Pictures.

swes-model-00a.png

demake-small.png

Some first design sketches. I like the Layout of the Mario-Watch Keypad, but a SNES-Style watch would be cool (Not really a fashion hit though).

As you can tell I like Secret of Mana, and there really should be a watch for it.
With the low resolution and almost-no-gray-scale display it really butchers the graphics, but getting it down to size is part of the challenge. On Aliexpress I found a 128x64 LCD, and of course the Color-Nokia-LCD could be another choice.

I am not sure I will complete this project, but I have a 3D printer and I have made some fun things with Arduino. It is crazy how affordable and cheap those components got. If you look at Thingiverse there is more then one watch project.

See you around.