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Thumby Color: GBA clone with 0.85-inch colour display

9/8/2024

Translation: machine translated

It looks like a tiny Nintendo Game Boy Advance. But the Thumby Color from TinyCircuits cannot emulate Nintendo games. The Raspberry Pi-powered handheld plays games programmed in MicroPython.

The Thumby has been around since 2016. A tiny handheld that looks like a Game Boy and offers a monochrome gaming experience. Now TinyCircuits has unveiled its successor. However, it is not called Thumby Advance, as its appearance would suggest due to its similarity to the Game Boy Advance, but Thumby Colour.

So that you can actually play if you hit the buttons, the Thumby Colour is equipped with a Raspberry Pi RP2350 CPU (150MHz Dual Cortex-M33). This is supported by 520 kilobytes of RAM and 16 megabytes of flash memory.

The development board of the Thumby Colour.
Source: TinyCircuits

You also get a 0.85-inch IPS colour display (16-bit) with 128 × 128 pixels, a D-pad, A/B buttons, a menu button, shoulder buttons and a rumble motor. A speaker and a USB-C port are also included. This supplies the battery (110 mAh) with power and the memory with software. One battery charge should last for two hours of gameplay.

Measures just 5.16 × 3 × 1.16 centimetres.
Source: TinyCircuits

If you want games for this, you can look for them on the internet. There is even the option of playing Thumby games in the browser without a handheld. Or you can programme your own. You can do this with MicroPython in the free browser code editor.

For the time being, the dwarf is "available" from 49 US dollars in four colours exclusively on Kickstarter. Next year, the handheld will also be available outside of the crowdfunding platform, but without the black version - this is available exclusively during the Kickstarter campaign at the inflated price of 75 US dollars. Bear in mind that even if the manufacturer has run successful campaigns in the past, there is a risk with Kickstarter.