It’s been an eventful two months, so let’s do another Game Bub update!
Bespoke Parts
Last update, we shared that injection mold production was underway, and that we were waiting for samples of the Game Bub dual battery pack and our custom laminated IPS LCD modules.
This update, we’re excited to share these samples have arrived (or are arriving shortly), and we’re getting ready for the next stage of production!
Battery Pack
We have the samples in hand, and they work well! The Game Bub battery pack is made up of two standard 803450 lithium ion cells, impedance matched and safely joined together by the factory with the proper protection circuitry.
We were pleasantly surprised to find that the battery pack perform better than the ones we built ourselves during development. We’ve given the factory the go-ahead to proceed with final safety certification and mass production.
Laminated IPS screen
We received samples of these as well, and they look great! The fully laminated screens make a noticeable difference in display quality and viewing angle, since there’s no air gap between the cover glass and the panel.
We’ve approved the samples and design, and the supplier is purchasing materials to proceed to mass production.
Injection molded parts
The Game Bub shell, buttons, and Dock are all made of injection molded plastic. If you’ve been following these updates, you know that the development of these parts has been long, difficult, and expensive. And that’s why we’re extremely happy to report that the first engineering samples are ready!
Elecrow has physically inspected the samples for obvious defects and taken some photos for us, and the parts will arrive in the US at the end of the week.
Engineering samples are the very first parts made after the mold is milled. The primary purpose is to check that the mold works, the parts can be ejected cleanly, and that the mechanical properties (shape, dimensions, fit) are correct. There’s some appearance verification (such as checking for sink marks and knit lines), and we’ve asked the supplier to produce both transparent colorless and purple parts, but this isn’t the main purpose of these samples. Thus, these samples are not fully representative of the appearance of the actual production parts. Please keep that in mind!
The purple is darker than we intended, so we’ll be reducing the amount of pigment in the next round of samples. Game Bub is made with a 2.5mm-thick polycarbonate shell for extra durability, so a little bit of pigment goes a long way. We’ll be targeting the shade of purple in the thinner part by the cartridge slot.
Fortunately, while designing and milling the mold is expensive and time consuming, producing the actual plastic parts is fast and easy, so we’ll have no problem doing another round or two of samples.
Regulatory testing
Before Game Bub can ship to backers, we have to make sure it complies with applicable laws and regulations, such as CE in Europe, UKCA in the UK, FCC regulations in the US, and various international battery shipping standards.
The battery supplier is already working on collecting the necessary information (there’s no risk here, it just takes some time).
The testing lab has also been conducting FCC emissions and CE testing on Game Bub and the Dock. We’re pleased to report that both devices have passed electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) testing, which regulates how much electromagnetic emissions they produce, and how they respond to interference. This is an important milestone for Game Bub!
It’s also quite a relief, since we were weren’t sure Game Bub was going to pass on the first try. We aren’t professional electronic engineers, and eliminating excessive EM emissions can be tricky. Fortunately, following best practices for electronic design and PCB layout seems to have been sufficient.
The rest of the CE testing will be completed soon. The lab needed to wait for the injection molded enclosures, because the rest of the testing can only be done on a complete product. Fortunately, EMC testing was the most difficult part, so we don’t anticipate any issues.
Production Timeline
Once we receive the enclosure samples (very soon!), we’ll make sure everything fits together correctly. Then we can proceed to mass PCB production.
Looking at timelines from each of the suppliers (PCB, PCBA, enclosures, batteries, screens, and miscellaneous mechanical parts), nearly everything will be ready by early May. The full LCD production run, unfortunately, is going to take a little bit longer than we had hoped, and so Game Bub won’t be ready for final assembly until late May.
Unfortunately, this means we are going to miss our previously estimated shipping date (mid-May). The current plan is to get everything ready for production, so that when the LCDs are ready, we can go ahead and assemble everything without any further delay. Our new estimated delivery date is early July. We’re at the home stretch, with most of the uncertainty out of the way. It’s been a long journey, and we thank you for your continued patience.
Hardware Improvements
We have a little bit more to share!
When we announced that we were switching to a new display back in December, we completely forgot to mention that the new display supports full 24-bit color (previously, it was only 18-bit color). This doesn’t really affect any existing use-cases (the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance only produce 15-bit video output), but it’s a nice thing to have for the future!
We’ve also made the device more useful for developers and tinkerers: the FPGA JTAG pins are now easily accessible through a connector on the right side of the device.
Finally, if you’ve been following the news in the past few months, you may have seen that RAM prices have skyrocketed in 2026. We didn’t expect this to affect the older SDR SDRAM that Game Bub uses, but the price of our SDRAM chips have actually more than tripled since the end of last year. So naturally, we’ve made the brilliant decision to double the amount of SDRAM in Game Bub: devices will now ship with 64 MiB of SDRAM (up from 32 MiB)!
Fortunately we actually purchased all of the PCB components at the end of 2025, so we haven’t impacted by the price increases yet.
We actually sneakily teased this change in our February update, but it doesn’t look like anybody noticed:
Stay in touch on Discord
If you haven’t already joined the Game Bub Discord, now’s a great time! We’ll continue to post updates on Crowd Supply, but the Discord is a good place to ask questions and talk with other members of the growing Game Bub community.