The ESP32-S3 brass circuit console built by HVT Lab and Huy Vector is exactly what it looks like: a fully functional handheld gaming device held together by soldered brass wire, a strip of clear acrylic, and a fair amount of ambition. There is no case. There is no shell. What you see is what you get, and what you get is rather beautiful.
Brass, Solder and a 2.4-Inch IPS Display
The structural frame of the device is built from soldered brass, with the wiring doing double duty as both electrical conductor and physical skeleton. A small strip of 2 mm clear acrylic, held in place with cyanoacrylate adhesive, stabilises the buttons, but the brass and solder carry the real load. According to Circuit Digest, the build centres on an ESP32-S3 N16R8 microcontroller and pairs it with a 2.4-inch IPS display, which gives the little console a sharp, colourful screen that sits exposed within that open metalwork frame.
The IPS panel is a thoughtful choice for a build like this. An IPS screen offers wide viewing angles and good colour reproduction, qualities that matter when you are squinting at a Game Boy-era game on a pocket-sized display without even a bezel to frame it. The whole assembly is pocket-sized, though whether you would actually trust your pocket with an open power bus and bare solder joints is another question entirely.
That is the one practical concern with this otherwise loveable build. The exposed brass frame means the power bus is right there, unguarded. Drop this into a bag with your keys and you could have a short circuit on your hands. Enclosing the whole thing in acrylic, as the builder has used in part for the button strip, would have addressed that. But doing so would also have buried the aesthetic that makes this console worth writing about in the first place.
ESP32-S3 Brass Circuit Console and the Retro-Go Software Stack
Espressif almost certainly did not design the ESP32-S3 with handheld emulation in mind, yet the chip has become one of the more popular choices for DIY retro gaming hardware. Its combination of processing headroom, wireless connectivity and a compact footprint makes it well suited to recreating the experience of a Game Boy or Game Gear, and the open-source community has built a healthy ecosystem of firmware to support exactly that.
From the video of this build, the software appears to be based on Retro-Go, a well-regarded open-source emulation framework that runs on ESP32 hardware. Retro-Go supports a solid range of classic platforms, and it is a natural fit for a project like this where the physical build is the centrepiece and the software simply needs to work reliably and look good doing it. The N16R8 variant of the ESP32-S3 brings 16 MB of flash storage and 8 MB of PSRAM to the table, which gives it enough headroom to handle Retro-Go and most of what that framework can throw at it.
Beyond Retro-Go, the ESP32-S3 platform is compatible with a range of other open-source projects, from NES emulators through to IBM PC compatibility layers. The N16R8’s memory spec means builders are not immediately hitting a ceiling when exploring the more demanding ends of what the chip can run.
Circuit Sculpture as a Design Philosophy
What HVT Lab and Huy Vector have made here is properly a circuit sculpture as much as it is a games console. The 90s aesthetic of translucent plastic cases was always about visibility, about letting the hardware show through. This build removes even that intermediary. The brass frame is the hardware, and the hardware is the frame.
It is a deliberate aesthetic choice, and a coherent one. Every joint, every wire run, every component placement has to be considered not just for function but for how it looks suspended in open air. That discipline tends to produce cleaner builds than a project destined for an opaque enclosure, where you can always hide a messy wire run behind a panel.
Whether you would emulate Game Boy Colour games or Mega Drive titles on it matters rather less than the fact that someone built a functional ESP32-S3 brass circuit console that looks like it belongs in a gallery as much as a trouser pocket. The full build details, including the N16R8 microcontroller spec and the 2.4-inch IPS display, are covered at Circuit Digest.
