If you thought the Zelda Watch was the ultimate procrastination device, then think again. A 2nd year engineering student in France called Raphaël Texier has created a ruler that would definitely have caused me to fail all of my exams at school, but one that would have made maths a heck of a lot more interesting. It's called the Retro-Ruler and houses a retro emulator in it that can play games up to and including the Game Gear and Game Boy Color.
Raphaël rightly states that we often use a ruler in many professions, especially those of an engineering or technological background. He wanted to make the bog-standard ruler more exciting and seemingly a work deterrent in the process. But hey - we love his ingenuity here.
The Retro-Ruler has been a labour of love on Raphaël's part, with a successful Kickstarter campaign for the first iteration of the device already completed. In terms of components and stats, the Retro-Ruler boasts a 1.69-inch IPS screen with a resolution of 280*240px and has 8MB of RAM with a 16MB flash. It has an ESP-32-S3 dual-core microcontroller at its core with a 230mAh LiPo battery that provides around 2 hours of gameplay and features USB-C fast-charging. You can use a 64GB SD card inside too, which should be plenty of space for all of your legally acquired ROMs.
There are 12 buttons and 2 shoulder buttons on this ruler, which is something I never thought I would say. In terms of consoles it can emulate, the Ruler uses open-source firmware called Retro-GO made by ducalex and plays games from:
- NES
- SNES (some games)
- GameBoy
- GameBoy Color
- Game & Watch
- Master System
- Mega Drive (Genesis)
- Game Gear
- Lynx
- PC Engine
- Coleco Vision
- MSX
And yes, it plays DOOM!
Head to the official Retro-Ruler Kickstarter page to back the project and to find out more about Raphaël's work!
