BeepMini - a Fantasy Console for Retro Games

A couple of months ago, while clearing out my grandfather’s attic, I stumbled across a box of dusty electronics and a stack of strange looking cassette tapes. Among the odds and ends was a device that resembled the original Gameboy—but it had to be over 40 years old.

I’d never seen anything like it. My grandfather was a tech genius, always ahead of his time, but this was new, even to me. Searching online didn’t bring up any leads, either.

The machine looked a little homemade, yet somehow finished. Like the Gameboy, it had a D-pad, two numbered buttons, and a start button. There was also a chunky power switch and a slot for the cassettes.

Instead of the flat screens we’re used to, this thing had a curved CRT screen; chunky, heavy, and utterly impractical for a hand-held console. The orientation of the screen is portrait, and possibly supports touch interfaces (though it’s hard to tell), like a precursor to the iphone, but 30 years too early. When it turned on, the screen hummed like an old television stuck between channels.

Seeing the pile of cassette cartridges gave me a wave of nostalgia, though I knew I’d never used anything like them before. With no way to actually load them, I decided to focus on the code I could dig into. Luckily, the cartridges weren’t just plastic shells; they held files I could read with a little bit of fiddling.

When I finally loaded the disks, I found code for all sorts of games. I’ve been making games as a hobby since the late ’90s, using all sorts of different programming languages, so I dove right in.

Weirdly, the code felt very similar to JavaScript, full of unnecessary semicolons and strange syntax. Obviously, JavaScript hadn’t been invented yet, unless Brendan Eich was secretly coding in our attic.

What I discovered amazed me; there are dozens of games in various stages of development. Despite being over 40 years old, many of them are surprisingly advanced and fun to play. Since I have the code I am now adapting them to work online, and that’s what you’ll (eventually) find on this website: a collection of games for the Beep8 console.

I still have no idea who made the console or how my grandfather got his hands on it. But I want to preserve these games and share them with future generations. I guess all I can do now is keep releasing the games - and see if anyone else remembers this thing, or pretends to.

Follow along on social to see what I uncover next!