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Last year I pre-ordered the Thumby keychain from TinyCircuits' kickstarter, and it finally arrived yesterday!
Thumby, “The Tiny Playable Keychain”
Ordinarily I wouldn't pre-order rando stuff from a kickstarter, but the Thumby was already completely designed and prototyped, all the kickstarter was doing was funding their full production run. I've also made an autonomous glider[1] using their TinyDuino, so I knew TinyCircuits already had experience and the industrial setup to produce very high-quality “tiny stuff”.
I picked up a clear shell one to complement my array of clear shell Game Boys. It also came with a “commemorative keychain” that's the circuit of the motherboard on one side and the Thumby logotype on the other. It's a bit weird to include a second keychain alongside your product that's already a keychain, but hey it's still pretty cool.
The bonus keychain's expose traces side.
Thumby vs real Game Boy size comparison (also note the spiffy clear shells)
When I first opened the box I was immediately struck with how small it was. I obviously knew it was tiny (they had promo videos showing it being smaller than a carpenter bee!) but it's hard to quite get a sense of just how tiny it is until you hold it. It's a tad smaller than an SD card, so if you want a metric of its size go grab an SD card and imagine trying to play a game on it.
Naturally I expected it to be a novelty item, not something you'd actually play any games on beyond the first time, or maybe if you're really bored. However, it's actually not too bad, at least not as bad as one would expect. I'm lucky enough to have good eyesight so I can see the screen clearly, which would definitely be the biggest hinderance. The hardest part is moving your fingers between the buttons and pressing them properly with any form of speed or accuracy. Games that don't require you to move your fingers, or only require one/two buttons are the most playable ones.
It comes with an array of games pre-loaded, here's the list sorted from most playable to least playable (IMO):
One-button controls, and you only need to keep track of one or two things on the screen at a time. Simple enough and moderately engaging for short periods.
Since you only need up and down controls you can treat the D-Pad like a rocker, which makes using it a lot easier. Not particularly fun to play though.
The most ambitious pre-loaded game. It's entirely turn-based so you don't have to try and make any quick inputs. This is the point where the games get difficult enough to play that there is no particular joy in it.
Quick reaction time D-Pad inputs *and* you have to use both of the action buttons? Complete insanity to try and play.
Same issues as TinyBlocks, but contending with the Asteroids-like acceleration physics with the added challenge of using all four directions (rather than just left and right like TinyBlocks) just compounds on it.
The extremely fast-paced inputs required for Snake are impossible on the D-Pad. Even worse, in this version you die when you hit a wall instead of wrapping around like a Snake game typically would.
Overall, the Thumby is largely a novelty thing to say “look at this neat thing on my keychain, it's the world's smallest game console!” I can legitimately see myself playig Tinysaur Run if I was really bored though since I don't have video games on my phone and don't carry my Gameboy/GBA/Vita/Switch around most of the time. I'm quite enamored with this little nifty guy, more than the average person would be.
I'll have to look into programming it (which was the main reason I was interested in it in the first place) and also check out some community-made games. Maybe the community will have figured out how to make more legitimately playable games.
[1]: I've also made an autonomous glider
A while ago I made a post on getting a MiniDisc recorder:
My old (for me) gemlog post on MiniDiscs
I haven't really talked about it since then, but it's been one of my favorite devices; I use it to listen to music constantly even when I'm not out and about. The only downside is that since I have an older player, I have to wait for it to slowly record music in real-time like a cassette, which is a big problem for someone like me with few MiniDiscs and wanting to constantly listen to different music depending on my mood.
Here's a Fediverse thread detailing everything I like about it :)
It eventually got grating enough that I decided to pick up a “NetMD” recorder, which can record substantially faster through a USB connection to a computer. Plus you then get the maximum quality possible by directly converting the FLAC files to ATRAC instead of doing a Digtial->Analog->Digital conversion. I did use an optical cable for recording though so I avoid the lossy conversions no matter what method I use to record.
I picked up a Sony MZ-N505 recorder, which is pretty much the most base NetMD model you can get. It came with a remote (which is very rare and I struggled to find a recorder that came with a remote), a wall AC adapter, plus a bunch of extra MiniDiscs in a fancy case.
The first thing I did was be a hackerman and do the memory hack to unlock a bunch of new features:
To actually make use of the faster recording, I had to get a WebMD client on my computer. The Web MiniDisc[2] client that everyone recommends is chrome-only because of course it is, we're back at the internet explorer days of the web. I tried at Platinum-MD[3], but it's electron crap, and they only provide an AppImage or snap package. It worked passably but didn't scale on my HiDPI display, literally made my computer fans rev up just by launching it, and had very weird UI choices that made it needlessly annoying to use.
So I looked at what Platinum-MD is using in the backend, which looks like linux-minidisc[4] that all the other NetMD implementations are based off of. Exactly what I'm looking for, but doesn't do the ATRAC conversion for you. I managed to dig up atracdenc[5] which fits the bill perfectly. Even supports ATRAC3 a.k.a. LP2/LP4 mode which is what I usually use for most recordings. So after a very angry few hours[6], I wrote up a tiny script to convert a file to ATRAC and then upload it to the MiniDisc player:
Then I just use `netmdcli` to fiddle around with the tracks and groups as I please once they're uploaded. Much much much more convenient than having to slowly record songs, then having to set up all the proper track markers, then manually enter the titles (I usually didn't bother).
Since most of the time is spent waiting around for the files to convert to ATRAC, if I'm ever feeling really ambitious I might throw together a little program that converts to ATRAC in threads and serially uploads them as they finish converting for a bonus speed boost.
[6]: after a very angry few hours
Okay, once I started getting some tracks loaded up I could start actually listening with the darn thing! (Ignore the fact that I could've listened right away with my existing recorded discs)
I immediately noticed how much louder it was while recording[7], I imagine probably due to recording tracks at its maximum write speed rather than in real-time.
Other than the NetMD stuff it's not particularly different than my MZ-R700 though. It has this nice feature called “groups” that lets you group songs on a disc into a logical set, like albums if you have multiple albums on one disc. That's my favorite (and really the only notable) “new” feature. There is a mis-feature though, the LCD info screen is substantially smaller, so whereas on the R700 it could display a track number, progress through the track, and the track title; the N505 can barely display just one of those pieces of information at any given time. The remote it came with has a much bigger LCD so it's not as bad as it could be, but still annoying. I'll have to switch off between the two to decide if groups or a large screen are more useful to me. Groups will probably win since I usually use LP2/LP4 mode and pack 2–3 albums onto one disc, so jumping between them is very helpful to me.
[7]: how much louder it was while recording
This post makes it sound like I constantly order new crap but I ordered them at completely different times and they just both happened to arrive at the same time yesterday, okay? The last time I got something new was last month (the M5Paper), and before that I hadn't gotten anything new since October. And all the stuff I order I actually use regularly! I use my MiniDisc stuff every day and even if I won't play it often the Thumby will be great to have on my keychain. And my PDA that I got in October I also use almost every day too.
Plus this new MiniDisc player will save me over 5 hours every week that I typically spend real-time recording the music I feel like listening to onto MiniDisc! That's a substantial time savings!
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contact via email: alex [at] nytpu.com
