Playing video games for a college application
posted Feb 9th 2012 11:58am by Brian Benchofffiled under: ATtiny hacks
As a senior in high school, [Owen] has been waiting to hear from the colleges he applied to for months now. Some of his applications wanted a mid-year report to see if he didn’t come down with senioritis. [Owen] realized these colleges allowed additional materials beyond a high school transcript, so he built a tiny video game that shows his electrical and programming skills.
The Demomite, as [Owen] calls his build, is an amazing piece of work. The entire system is based around an ATtiny2313 with a measly 2kB of program memory. Aside from a graphic LCD from Sparkfun and a repurposed NES controller, there isn’t much else to the build. As a study in minimalism and simplicity, [Owen] gets a big congrats from us.
The entire game fits in the 2kB of flash on the ATtiny, mostly due to coding the entire thing in assembly. You can check out [Owen]‘s time-lapse construction video, software demo, and the video he sent to colleges after the break.
This is awesome! But, let’s be honest. In my opinion some of his other projects are better. Like connecting a hard drive to a micro controller. Although, from a hackers perspective, this isn’t his coolest project but from a non-hackers perspective it is. So, good move. :)