Remember Need for Speed? Someone built a real-life Mini Map from the game to use in your car (and it’s Open Source) | “Getting this to work on a $20 microcontroller meant processing the entire UK into 2.5 million map tiles, totaling 236GB of data”

Getting this to work on a $20 microcontroller meant processing the entire UK into 2.5 million map tiles, totaling 236GB of data stored on an SD card. The ESP32 loads them dynamically based on your heading, only pulling in new tiles from the direction you’re traveling because each one takes a tenth of a second to load. We’re talking weeks of optimization just to get map tiles loading fast enough, clever tricks to avoid tanking the frame rate, and some creative compromises that make the whole thing feel polished despite running on hardware that costs less than takeaway for two. What’s particularly cool is that all the code is open-source, meaning you could theoretically generate tiles for your own city styled after whatever game you’re nostalgic for.