I started thinking pretty soon after completing the custom cable channel project of housing a Raspberry Pi UNO into a repurposed cable box from the 1980s about other novel and interesting ideas to house single board computers. I recently was tidying up my work space and my eyes fell on a stack of Atari 2600 cartridges that failed to boot when testing them. It was during the process of taking the casing for a fairly grimy copy of Surround apart it dawned on me that these cases are the perfect size to house a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which I happened to have a couple just sitting on the desk mocking me for not using them.
The first stage was to completely disassemble the old cartridge, which honestly is a bit more challenging than it probably should be. I got pretty lucky removing the original labels, so I was able to reuse them after everything is assemble. There is only 1 phillips head screw to remove, but there are 6 plastic clips which require you to deal with before the casing will come apart. I used a small sized slotted screwdriver to carefully push the clips in and manage to get the thing apart, but I could definitely see people breaking the tabs and/or scarring up the plastic of the cartridge while trying to get these things disengaged. After that it's pretty straightforward. The dust cover assembly slides out, and nothing is holding the game ROM in place. I opted to save my ROM, since I'm still going to see if I can rehab the pins to check if it might actually boot after a good scrubbing.
The next step was to hot glue the offsets in place inside the cartridge to mount the Raspberry Pi. I decided to run a very bare bones distro of the Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit) which comes with no desktop. My goal here is a totally basic Linux system hidden inside an old Atari cartridge. Maybe I'll install Stella or some other 2600 emulator on it at some point - I imagine it would be pretty cool to play 2600 games on a computer housed inside an actually 2600 game.
After testing to make sure everything worked, I reassemble the case and glued the orginal labels back into place. Since the Pi Zero W uses 2 micro USB connections (one for USB stuff and one to power the board) I decided to put a red dot of paint underneath the power connection, since you can't easily read the board to prevent me from inadvertently mixing up the connections.
Fun project that was totally a spontaneous use of time that I should have allocated to doing something else.
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