Uzebox in an NES controller

[David Cranor] has managed to fit a fully working Uzebox system into an old NES controller. Uzebox, an open source gaming platform based on the ATmega 644 and an AD725 NTSC encoder, is one of a couple systems that are becoming more and more widespread and accessible. There are a number of ready-to-go Uzebox kits available, but for the … Read the rest

Virtual pool, real-world interface

Sunday we saw robots playing pool and an augmented reality pool game. Today we’ll complete the pool trifecta: virtual pool using a real cue stick and ball in another vintage video from Hack a Day’s secret underground vault. The video is noteworthy for a couple of reasons:

First is the year it was made: 1990. There’s been much buzz lately … Read the rest

C64 emulator for iPhone approved — minus BASIC

c64

After a lengthy process that had previously met with rejection, Manomio’s Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone and iPod touch has finally been accepted by Apple. This marks the first time a multi-purpose emulation title has been approved by the App Store. The $4.99 C64 app comes bundled with five fully-licensed classic games, and additional titles can be purchased and … Read the rest

Arduino + hang man = Hangmanduino

We saw this nifty little toy today and thought you guys might get a kick out of it.  Its called the Hangmanduino, and as you can probably tell from the name, it plays hang man. This was an exercise in simplicity, you’ll notice there is only a single control for the entire game. We thought that the design was … Read the rest

VR Game Gun

Many of you have probably experimented with alternative gaming interfaces. Here’s a well done little hack where they created a gun with a display mounted on it, for video gaming.  At a glance you can probably figure out exactly what they’ve done. They’ve attached a gyration mouse to the gun for tracking and gutted a keyboard for the buttons.  … Read the rest

Dice-O-Matic

[Scott] runs gamesbyemail.com. One of his biggest hurdles was producing real random numbers for the games. He had tried various methods like math.random and random.org, but kept getting complaints about the quality of the random numbers. His solution was to build an automatic dice roller. His initial attempts were made from Legos and were never quite reliable enough to … Read the rest

OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator teardown

m8ta fun did an extensive teardown of OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA). OCZ’s computer/mind interface is actually a fairly straight forward design. An analog front-end cleans and amplifies the ‘neural’ signal with a few op-amps before feeding it to a 24 bit analog to digital converter (ADC). A USB enabled PIC microcontroller reads the 24bit parallel ADC output through … Read the rest