Back in 2009, [Evi1wombat] pulled of this interesting hack, and it has slowly made its way through the internet to find us today. He obtained the computer from a recently deceased treadmill and decided to hack into it. Finding himself unable to flash the existing chip, he yanked it out and replaced it with something he was more familiar with, a dsPIC30F4011. Unfortunately we don’t have any pics of the inside, but he says that he had some fun with wire because the pin mapping wasn’t exactly the same. [Evi1wombat] also gained some respect for the original designer judging by this quote from the source code:
* Damn, the dude who designed that board pulled
* some pretty nifty tricks… took a while to
* get all the drivers working.
Of course, once you have control over some nifty new hardware, the first logical thing to do on it is play “Still Alive” from the game Portal.
Enjoy the video after the break.
Nice, I love when you look at a design and rather than being some lazy work it turns out that the engineer had some fun.
Really humanises them, same with little in game easter eggs etc.
This is my fav so far:
http://dcemulation.org/files/emulators/esmpkrl/ECHELON.TXT
This file was left on “Sega Smash Pack: Volume 1”
Echelon was a well known pirating group.
Source:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19745_the-5-ballsiest-easter-eggs-hidden-in-video-games.html
That was pretty great. :)
Speaking of easter eggs, I’ve always liked the obvious references in some of Sierra’s old games, like Genetix in Space Quest V. Of course, at the time Dynamix was a division (?) of Sierra, but it was still funny. That and the Sprint logo in the transmission. Or Alexander breaking the fourth wall in King’s Quest 6, when you make him fall enough times.
Better do your cardio…OR ELSE! ;)
Nice job – I really like the karaoke effect and the 2 displays working together.
The hardware that runs this is not technically a “computer”.
How so?
Hackerspacer isn’t right in the head.
Thats how
Gasp! A hack on hackaday from a friend of mine! Ev1lwombat is pretty ridiculous. If you didn’t already see it, he also did the ending to portal 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js-LF7OfC9s
Nice work! His legacy of dsPIC30F4011 chips still lives on at the UMD robotics club.