[Ben Heck] may be the coolest person ever (take that [Adam Savage]). You would think that after producing so many laptop versions of gaming consoles he would grow tired or we would be bored of them. But no! We love each and every new production – including his latest laptop-ified Ps3. Not too much in the terms of ‘new’ comes from his latest article, but it does reaffirm some things including: why make what you can buy, cheap foam sheet should be purchased by the ton, and use the screws from an overheated Xbox 360 when you lose the Ps3 originals. Oh, and [Adam] we were just kidding, you know we will always love you. Check out a video after the break.
[Ray] had a Guitar Hero controller for PlayStation 2 sitting around. Because he moved on to playing the game on Xbox 360, he decided to cannibalize the older controller for its parts. He removed the strum bar and fit it inside of a mid-1980’s Peavy Patriot electric guitar. Once wired up, it works as a kill switch; it stops all sound from making it to the amp whenever the strum bar switch is actuated. Don’t miss hearing this effect in the video after the break and keep sending in those Guitar Hero mods. Read the rest of this entry »
We may have all been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the PS3 slim, but don’t get too excited yet. According to an official press release from Sony, the PS3’s slimmer counterpart is dropping the ability to install Linux or another operating system. It’s always a shame when new products come packed with less features, but this time, it’s preventing us from doing things like cracking SSL using 200 of the consoles, or running emulators from an Ubuntu install on the console. For those of us that still plan on keeping our “old” PS3s, Yellow Dog Linux has been released on a USB stick and allows you to run without having to do a full installation.
[Alan] isn’t very good at guitar. He says so himself. He’s not that great at guitar hero either. Was that medium difficulty? Let’s put aside his skill to talk about his controller. He has fused the guitar hero controller with a real guitar. The original guitar has retained its functionality, though the controller bits may get in the way if he jams really hard. With a flip of the switch, it turns into a guitar hero controller. You simply press the strings down at the frets where the buttons should be, while strumming the controller part.
Remember those days, back in the arcade, where games with a unique control scheme also had a controller best suited for them? There were rolling balls, joysticks, dials, all sorts of inputs. Consoles have maily relied on their standard controllers, relegating alternative inputs to be strange collectors items. Some games just need a specialized controller though. For example, Katamari Damacy. [Kellbot] has made one that we think suits the game very well.
[Raphael] sent us this nice kick pedal mod for Guitar Hero: World Tour. After breaking his kick pedal repeatedly, he decided to build something a bit more robust. He went to the music store intending to pick up a cheap kick pedal to start with and happened to start a conversation with an employee who had a practice pad to get rid of. [Raphael] relieved him of his practice pad and promptly made a base to hold it in position. After attaching his piezo sensor to the back of it, he had a very robust kick pedal. we can’t imagine him breaking this one any time soon.
Gizmodo has done us all a favor by wading through many forum posts and condensing them into a handy guide to installing Ubuntu on your Playstation 3. It covers some of the caveats of going this route. You have to backup all of your game data before starting since the system repartitions the drive. Ubuntu installs without any problem, but because the cell processor is a PowerPC architecture it means not everything has been ported to it. There are a few things you need to install to get the Sixaxis controller to be recognized as a joystick. Super Nintendo emulator SNES9X is available and works, mostly. It doesn’t support fullscreen and cries if you reconfigure the buttons.
Supporting developers through alternate operating systems isn’t new to Sony. With the original Playstation, they released Net Yaroze, a consumer grade dev kit. The Playstation 2 was the first time they officially supported Linux on a game console (our first Linux machine). The ground breaking thing about the Playstation 3 was bundling in Linux support with every single console; no specialized hardware needed. Unfortunately they’re not near as open with the PSP.
Recently, a Japanese coder on the DCEmu Forums released Windows drivers for DualShock 3 controllers. While the drivers only support using the controllers over USB and not bluetooth, they do include force feedback and Sixaxis support. Included with the drivers is a configuration tool, and though it appears to be in Japanese there is some explanation of how to use it included in the forum post. We have not tested these personally, but you can try out the drivers for yourself by downloading them from the forum here.
On the off chance that you want to program a microcontroller to play your games for you, you should check this out. Near Future Laboratories has made a dongle that can allow an Arduino to operate as a PS2 or PS3 controller. You can see the Arduino running a random path generator in Katamari Damacy in the video above. They wanted to see how long it would take to clear a room. It managed to get almost all of them in about 70 minutes, only missing those that you have to cross a narrow bridge for. Actually, this could be quite useful in allowing people to create alternative input methods. You may recall reading about their early progress back in June 2008.
[matiaz] has released an exploit which allows homebrew on the PSP3000. It takes advantage of a vulnerability when loading save games on a game called GripShift. You can see the PSP running unsigned code in the video.
