Treasure of Tarmin on a Beautiful Handheld

Many years after playing Treasure of Tarmin (later renamed as Minotaur) on the Intellivision, hacker Jason Carlson decided to recreate it as part of a handheld gaming device.

The physical system features a beautiful wood grain finish and a nice controller layout, almost worthy of an article by itself. The Game Boy-like unit is equipped with three buttons, two for A/B gameplay and another on top for game reset, while the joystick consists of a five-way switch with a custom Sugru molded top.

However, the software work that went into it is even more impressive. He was able to rebuild this game from scratch thanks to his long-past gaming experience, and some map data he found online. He even integrated a few improvements along the way!

As seen in the video below, this 3D dungeon crawler runs just fine on a Meduino board, which is a smaller Arduino Mega clone. Additional electronics include an Adafruit 1.8" LCD screen, a SparkFun 5V booster, an internal speaker, and a tiny vibration for haptic feedback .

You can find all of the project’s necessary code and other details on its GitHub page here.