Summary
- I love tiny builds, like this pocket Pac-Man on a 1.69″ ST7789, tilt-controlled, palm-sized screen.
- It doubles as the Official 2026 Fiesta San Antonio medal as a wearable, collectible game.
- It gives an authentic arcade experience with full Z80 emulation, SPI DMA 60 FPS, and original sound effects.
One of my favorite things people do with microcontrollers is to make really itty-bitty versions of classic games. While it may not be practical to play a game on a tiny screen for long periods of time, I feel like these projects win on geek cred alone. Well, someone has gone and added Pac-Man to a 1.69” screen, and you can control it using tilt controls. Very cool.
You, too, can make this adorable ESP32 1.14-inch desktop monitor
It doesn’t need wires, either.
This tiny Pac-Man game can easily fit in the palm of your hand
Screen and all
Over on the ESP32 subreddit, user aedile recently posted a thread showing off their newest project. It’s an ESP32-C6 combined with a 1.69″ ST7789 LCD screen, and you control it by tilting the enclosure. The creator says that ” I didn’t do so great in the video because of playing left-handed while holding a camera, and the battery isn’t really secured,” but they promise that using it is “wicked fun”.
It’s more than just a conversation piece, though. According to both the Reddit post and the GitHub page for the project, this piece is destined for greater things:
Official 2026 Fiesta San Antonio Medal – This project doubles as a wearable Fiesta medal, celebrating Fiesta San Antonio‘s tradition of unique, collectible pins with a fully functional handheld game!
I’ve never heard about Fiesta medals before, so this cool project also doubled as a great way to learn about San Antonio’s culture and events. I don’t know about you, but if I were to get a medal with Pac-Man on it, I wouldn’t want to let it go.
The GitHub page also goes into a deeper dive into what this project contains. The creator claims it uses “full Z80 CPU emulation at original arcade speeds” with all the original game logic preserved. It also uses SPI DMA to get a smooth 60 FPS during gameplay, and comes with original sound effects, too.
If you want to make your own, all the instructions should be in the GitHub page linked above. The creator wisely didn’t distribute the ROM for Pac-Man in their project, so you’ll need to source your own. However, I think the effort is well worth it for a one-of-a-kind medal like this one.
