[Sprite_TM] cooked up an amazing hack by resurrecting a Mac SE using a Dockstar and ARM processor. The retro hardware had a bad mainboard thanks to the corrosive properties of a failed backup-battery. He had been wanting to do something with the Seagate Dockstar and decided it would find a nice home in the Mac. But what fun is a dead machine housing a headless server? To add to the fun he included an ARM processor running a Mac emulator, along with all the bits to make the screen, keyboard, and peripherals work. When the Mac is off the Dockstar still runs as a server.

But one of the best parts is the floppy drive. It still takes floppies, but there’s no magnetic media inside of them anymore. Instead, he’s added an SD card slot and some protoboard in the space for the read head. The drive itself has had the read head transplanted for some pogo pins (hey, we saw those earlier today). When you insert the floppy, the pogo-pins raise up and contact the protoboard, connecting the SD card to a Teensy microcontroller.

There’s so much going on with this project we just can’t cover it all here. Things like a chemical cleaning to return the original color of the classic case, and building a converter so that the peripherals are USB compatible are just some of the pleasures awaiting you in [Sprite_TM's] post. He’s also filmed a demo video that we’ve embedded after the break.

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The Dell Streak is an Android tablet. [Collin Meyer] wanted to use an original SNES controller to play emulated games on the device. What he came up with is a controller that is a dock for he handheld.

Several things have to come together to make this happen. The Streak uses a standard PDMI dock that connects to a computer via a USB connection. [Collin] repurposed a sync cable by connecting a couple of pins on the dock connector which forces the device to use USB host mode. From there he used a Teensy microcontroller to convert the SNES controller into a USB device (very similar to this hack). The Teensy and shortened sync cable find a new home inside the SNES controller body and, in the video after the break, it looks like he used something like sugru to add a bit of support for the Streak.

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Processsing has come to Android. [Jer] posted a guide to setting up the software and coding your first Processing app for Android. The module which supports Google’s mobile operating system is not yet part of the stable Processing release but it works and is available to download and use. It provides support for Android version 2.1 and newer, playing nicely with the SDK to emulate your sketches during development. The Hello World app seen above uses just a few lines of code to draw a white box on an orange background. After you’ve installed and tested the tools you’ll be developing in no time.

This makes a great addition to your Android development tool bag.

[Thanks Tech B]

[Sk3tch] rigged up a way to use an original NES controller with Android. He bought the controller and a breakout board for it at DEFCON. By combining the controller, an Arduino, and a blueSMIRF BlueTooth module the controller can be used as a keyboard on his Android device. In the video after the break he demonstrates pairing the devices and playing Super Mario Bros. 3 in an emulator.

He calls this Alpha quality but it certainly looks like it works well. In the beta version we’d love to see all of the extra electronics inside the controller case like those USB mods.

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Tired of messing with the hardware of the Didj you picked up? Now you can use it for gaming on that last road trip of the summer. A Game Boy Advanced emulator has been ported for use on both the Didj and the Explorer. You’ll have to dig up a copy of the original bios for a GBA as well as some ROMs, but the rest seems pretty straight forward. We are still holding out hope for Doom or Quake on the Didj, but this will help us wait a bit longer.

[Thanks Nirvous via Rosincore]

If you’ve got an iPhone or Android device that you use with a Wii remote when gaming, this quick hack will give you the third hand you need to manage all of that hardware. [Syanni85] mounted his Android phone to a Wii wheel for just a few dollars in parts. He ran across the wheel itself at the dollar store, and the phone is held in place using a universal mounting bracket. A small square pad sticks onto the back of any device and mates with a base. He cut off the unnecessary parts of the base and glued it to the back of the wheel.

If you haven’t tried using a Wii remote with your phone yet, find out how to do it with iPhone or with Android.

[Retromaster's] Ultimate Floppy Emulator is a wicked display of hardware mastery. It is the culmination of several design stages aimed at replacing an Amiga floppy drive with a modern storage solution. You may be thinking that using an SD card in place of a floppy isn’t all that interesting but this hack does much more. The board, controlled by a PIC32, patches into the Amiga keyboard and monitor. This allows you to bring up an overlay menu for controlling the emulator in order to configure which virtual floppy disk is currently ‘in the drive’. He’s even gone so far as to add a piezo speaker to mimic the sounds the original drive head would make while reading a disk.

[Thanks Gokhan]

[Jaromir Sukuba] built a very portable, low power consumption Z80 emulator using a PIC microcontroller. Looking through his build photos we love the clean and resilient construction which includes a breakout board for the PIC 32MX795F512H that interfaces with the main board via pin headers and sockets. He’s using a home-built keyboard and a 4×40 character display but there is also the option to communicate with the device over an RS232 connection. Oh, and yes it plays Zork, which seems to be the benchmark whether you are emulating a Z80 with AVR hardware, or if you built one from transistor-transistor logic.