Would the ESP32 be able to do all this....

If you know about cheap electronics or are into homeautomation you must have heard or know about the ESP8266 wifi chip. It can be bought for less than $2 in most places and many cheap "smart switches and lights" are equipped with them. They were originally meant as a serial to wifi chip but are actually a tiny microcontroller that you can program with the arduino software or directly in C++. While a lot of cool things can be done with it the upgraded version known as ESP32 seems unstoppable in things it can do!!

I had ordered multiple of these development boards years ago but never actually did anything usefull with it. A few weeks ago I bought a kit to build an Odroid Go handheld game console that has the ESP32 as it's main chipset. It has an LCD screen, SD card slot and it looks and plays like a gameboy. Most 8 bit console emulators run perfectly fine on it! I have recently seen it being used as a Optical Drive Emulator for the sega saturn and even for the original playstation 1 now!!

Some fun specs of the ESP32 from the datasheet:
- Dual core Xtensa CPU at 240Mhz
- Up to 16MB Flash ROM
- Up to 4MB external SRAM
- Bluetooth 4.2
- Wifi B/G/N
- Ethernet MAC
- Multiple GPIO's
- SDIO
- SPI
- and a lot more fun hardware!

In other more simple words for the none technical people still reading....cool you're still with me ....this is a tiny microcontroller with build in wifi and bluetooth and it will cost you less than a Big Mac! Ofcourse the Raspberry pi can do a lot of those things to and has a LOT more RAM and even a real GPU! But it also has Linux running at the same time meaning anything that expects real time response might not work so well if you use the GPIO pins to control or interface to external hardware. The ESP32 does have a kind of OS that provides the Wifi+BT and probably other services you can use in you're app....but it's much more low level than Linux is!

Last year I was talking about a Raspberry pi as a modchip for the gamecube, an STM32 that might be able to provide USB and ethernet and a replacement for the unavailable USBGECKO debugging interface for the gamecube and wii...but for various reasons I stopped working on those projects. Mostly it was lack of time but also because it was getting complex and I was hitting a few road blocks to proceed with those projects. Seeing that the ESP32 is cheap and getting really popular and is even used in "commercial / professional" optical drive emulators for disk based game consoles! So why not use an ESP32 for my own projects as well right?

For my more recent projects of porting my homebrew game the thing I am missing the most is a way to debug stuff on the Wii and GameCube. The best option for that I could find was the USBGECKO but it's not really easy to just go and buy or build one. From what I have been able to figure out about it there is not that much too it....what makes it complex is that it uses a CPLD to interface with the memorycard slot and translate to a USB interface. I see no real reason the ESP32 could not interface to the MemoryCard slot and act to the software as if it was a USBGECKO! The interface to the PC would go over wifi or possibly even bluetooth so it looks like a serial interface.

But the other option I have talked about is a WiFi bridge for the PSP and DSi that use outdated wifi security protocols. The ESP32 could maybe act as the accesspoint that both of these consoles can actually connect to and the ESP32 can then relay that data over one of it's other interfaces....like serial, Bluetooth, or Ethernet or something.

For the GBA is can simply connect to it's link port and do all kinds of fun stuff for loading data, multiplayer, debugging, etc....

Hopefully this was not to boring...had these ideas in my head and I am a bit tired...so not sure if it even makes sense at the moment