If you wanted to take a look at some ancient artifacts, you don’t necessarily have to go to a museum these days. Check out your local arcade zone if you want to take a step back in time and you’ll probably still find many of those hulking video game consoles of yester-year, fully stocked with as little as one game to play and covetously devouring your precious quarters. Brings back memories, yes? Of course it does, because with the recent advancements of the video game era, it’s nice to sit comfortably at home with our powerful, multi-gigabyte consoles and think fondly of those days gone by. But if you’re looking for a little nostalgia, you can rest assured that there are still arcade systems lurking out there in the wild… and one of them even fits in the palm of your hand.

Created by Phillip Burgess of Adafruit, this Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (or MAME for short) arcade system really works, and is noted to play titles such as PAC-MAN, Donkey Kong, and Xevious. Check out the video below to see this interesting, tyke of a machine hard at work:

The MAME arcade boasts a Raspberry Pi computer, a 0.96″ RGB OLED display, an I2S class D audio amplifier and its dimensions run about 67.2 mm (2.65″) tall (with micro SD card installed), 33.6 mm (1.32″) wide, and 35.8 mm (1.41″) deep. For such a tiny machine, this is actually quite an impressive feat of micro-creation, though in all honesty its usefulness is quite impractical.

Burgess himself stated that the screen is just too small to see what you’re doing, and its smallness is just gimmicky. For this reason alone, the MAME arcade is not for sale nor will it be for sale, so gamers will just have to fill their need for cool tech by checking out this article on an amazing Overwatch-modded PC, or rack up those quarters for some old-fashioned gaming fun at your local amusement park. While it is kind of disappointing that we can’t carry our own tea-cup arcade for when we need a retro fix, it’s still quite interesting to see the work put into this kind of project. If you’re a tinkerer yourself, you can check out Burgess’ Adafruit article to see exactly how he did it. Who knows? Maybe it’ll spark some inspiration for your own, teensy future projects.

So what do you think of this independent project? Do you think it’s cool that someone created their own functioning mini-arcade? Are any of you tinkerers that have your own projects in the works? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and game on!