Clockwork’s modular GameShell is DIY retro gaming for beginners

Modular games consoles are great in theory, but when you’re still sitting up soldering at 3am and all you wanted was a quick game of Tetris after tea, the reality can be quite different. Fortunately, while Clockwork’s GameShell (US$159) is a DIY kit, it’s just a case of snapping the bits together and securing them inside the chassis. Once that’s done the Game Boy-esque handheld comes with RetroArch and some other emulators pre-installed, plus you can install ROMs yourself using USB or Wi-Fi. Inside there’s a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU, 1GB of DDR3 memory and a ClockworkPi mainboard v3.1, so if you do have the necessary skills you can pimp it, using the Lego studs on the back to attach any extra hardware. It’s by no means a requirement though, so you can probably just get cracking. As long as you’ve done the washing up, that is…

Tom Wiggins Contributor

About

Stuff's second Tom has been writing for the magazine and website since 2006, when smartphones were only for massive nerds and you could say “Alexa” out loud without a robot answering. Over the years he’s written about everything from MP3s to NFTs, played FIFA with Trent Alexander-Arnold, and amassed a really quite impressive collection of USB sticks.

Areas of expertise

A bit of everything but definitely not cameras.