David Montero Crespo, creator of Velxio.dev, has managed to run the classic 1998 PlayStation game Metal Gear Solid on the tiny, low-cost microcontroller board - the Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 Sense. Instead of emulating the old PlayStation hardware, the project rebuilds the game from its reversed C source code and compiles it directly to run on the ESP32-S3’s processor. The game data is stored on a microSD card, and the result is a fully playable version of the game on a board that costs around $15.
The hardware is very modest: a dual-core 240 MHz chip with a small amount of internal memory and 8 MB of extra PSRAM for graphics and game data. The developer gave it a game controller-like shape, making it easy to hold and control the game. He added a 320 × 240 SPI screen, a joystick, and buttons to make it complete. The whole circuit was done on a zero PCB. Because the ESP32 doesn’t have enough RAM to hold the entire game at once, it loads parts of the 71.9 MB game data from the microSD card as needed.
Making this work required solving many tricky problems like how the original PlayStation drew graphics, how it read data from discs, and how its code assumed certain CPU behaviors. Some areas of the game currently run around 15 frames per second, and the goal is to reach 30 fps. Audio, video cutscenes, codec calls, and save functionality are still unfinished, but the project already shows how a full 3D PlayStation game can be brought to life on a tiny, modern maker board.
