Our family loves Dr. Mario. That’s why I decided to write my own clone Dr. Vida. The 2025 Sars Covid edition is available for Miyoo Mini Plus and Esp32 cheap yellow display.

Porting the game to Miyoo mini was a very interesting challenge, as this was my first program for this device. One needs a patched SDL library, because the display is built in upside down. See my early renderings. The ebook application that comes with Onion OS was a good starting point, as it already shows how to render to display and how to use the buttons. The final touch was audio, for which one needs to kill the pre-installed audio server on app startup and rerun it when the application is closed. I’m very pleased with the outcome and playability of my version. It has all the original combo sounds from the Gameboy edition, color sprites from the SNES version, Gameboy font, menu, all the levels (1-20).

The cheap yellow display has quite a low resolution and no input device, besides the touch screen. So I fetched the input via serial console and wrote a tiny bash script that forwards linux joystick input over the serial connection.

As I was already on the flow I also created a little desktop version for Linux, too.

For copyright reasons I decided not to put the code and graphics on Github. I know there is not a huge load of code available for the Miyoo, so if you want a copy of the code, feel free to contact me by email.

Last modified on 2025-06-20