The Epic Minimalist Entertainment System, with its reverse-engineered LED dot matrix displays from the 1980s, is the leader in the ity bitsy games consoles committee.

You can keep your hulking modern handheld gaming machines. Compact retro systems? Pah! You can get the EMES, a tiny games machine that is barely larger than your thumb, and with cartridges smaller than your fingernail.

If I were on the judging panel for Hackaday's Tiny Games Competition, the Epic Minimalist Entertainment System would win by a wide margin. The rules aren't strict, but the past winners have set a high standard. What makes the EMES so special?

It's a tiny device. It's not much bigger than one Euro coin. It has a display, four button, a slot to hold the 'cartridges,' and a buzzer. You might think it's impossible to use because of its small size, but as you can see from the video above, it isn't too difficult to play Pong.

The dot-matrix display is what really makes this product stand out. It's a reverse engineered clone made by the person who designed the EMES. It's a 1980s Plessey GPD340. It's the simplest of all, with just two characters and a twin 5-by-7 monochromatic pixel grid, but it works well for this project. The gap between the characters adds a surprise element to Pong. It would be nice to see an EMES with a better display.

The board itself is not a processor, but rather resembles the first consoles that were available. Instead, it is embedded in the cartridge...well plug-in PCB. The tiny board is a microcontroller with an 8-bit ATTiny10, which runs at only 8 MHz. It has just 1 kB flash memory and 32 bytes RAM.

It's true that you need a different system to program the ATTiny10 but this is no different than any other console that uses cartridges. It's not easy to get everything working with a microcontroller that has so many features.

The buzzer and display's brightness control, for example, share the same IO-pin. However, the creator's solution is to set the output frequency to a level above the buzzer audible range to achieve full brightness, and then lower the frequency and display duty cycle to activate the loudspeaker. The display dims naturally, but not enough to cause a problem.

I love engineering projects and I admire anyone with the passion, skills and determination to make this happen, even for a competition. The Epic Minimalist Entertainment System is really something special. The build is of high quality, and as someone who's repeatedly burned his fingers with a soldering iron I am always amazed at how anyone can make such a small device.