GoKawiilis a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.
As handheld consoles continue to grow and push the limits of what you can actually hold in your hands, the Arduboy FX-C comes in a refreshingly pocketable package. It manages to squeeze the best features of past models and some welcome upgrades into a handheld that’s still no larger or thicker than a few credit cards. It’s the best version of the Arduboy so far, particularly for gamers who want to jump into the handheld’s ever-expanding library of games and apps right out of the box, but one of its most compelling upgrades isn’t quite ready for primetime.
The original Arduboy was a Tetris-playing business card created by Kevin Bates to show off his electronics skills. It went viral in 2014 prompting Bates to turn the idea into a commercial device a year later that was both a tiny open-source gaming device and a tool that could help would-be developers learn to code.
After over a decade of minor iterations, the Arduboy FX-C looks very much like the original. The controls are limited to six buttons, four of which function as a D-pad. They have a minimal amount of travel given the device is just 5mm thin, but a satisfying amount of click when pressed. The piezoelectric speaker is high pitched but more than loud enough, and its 1.3-inch, 1-bit OLED screen is bright enough to be playable outdoors.
The Arduboy FX-C (right) has a design that’s nearly identical to the original Arduboy (left) but with some added chips to accommodate hundreds of pre-installed games.
While the 37-year-old original Game Boy could display four shades of greenish-gray, the Arduboy FX-C’s screen is monochromatic and limited to only white pixels. Developers have to rely on visual tricks like dithering or flickering to create grayscale graphics. Equally limiting is the FX-C’s ATmega32u4 processor that’s paired with just 2.5KB of RAM. Compared to other black-and-white handhelds like the Playdate, the Arduboy FX-C feels primitive but its limitations have forced game developers to get creative and experimental, which is a big part of this platform’s appeal.
The original Arduboy features a microUSB port on the bottom, while the FX-C finally gets an upgrade to USB-C without adding any thickness.
My biggest frustration with the original Arduboy was its minimal storage that had me regularly connecting the device to my laptop when I wanted to play a different game. In 2020, Bates introduced the Arduboy FX with an extra flash chip on board that could hold 250 games. The FX-C inherits that chip, but a slightly larger version, bumping its included library of games to over 300, while also upgrading the device from microUSB to USB-C.
It’d be nice if the FX-C had a color screen, a proper D-pad, dedicated volume buttons, an improved sound chip, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even a microSD card slot, but none of those upgrades really feel necessary. It’s a handheld that feels pared down to the absolute bare necessities for gaming, but it works.
One feature that could use an upgrade is the Arduboy FX-C’s sliding power switch. It’s small and embedded on the top of the handheld, which sometimes makes it difficult to reach.
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