For those who haven’t addicted themselves to Super Hexagon yet, it’s pretty… addicting, to say the least. Normally this 80’s arcade-style game would run in a browser but some of the people at Club de Jaqueo in Buenos Aires decided to cram all of that into an Arduino. They didn’t stop there, though, and thought that it would work best with a POV display.
To navigate the intricate maze of blending a POV display with a fast-paced game like this, the group turned to the trusty Arduino Micro. After some frustration in the original idea, they realized that the game is perfectly suited for a POV display since it’s almost circular. The POV shouldn’t take up too much of the processing power of the Arduino, so most of the clock cycles can be used for playing the game. They couldn’t keep the original name anymore due to the lack of hexagon shape (and presumably copyrights and other legal hurdles), but the style of the original is well-preserved.
The group demonstrated their setup this past weekend, and the results are impressive judging by the video below. They’ve also released their source code and schematics as well, in case you have an old fan (or maybe even a bicycle?) lying around that is just begging to be turned into a mini-arcade game.
Very cool
;-)
…both meanings.
I guess you could say hes a real fan of the game ;)
Using a POV display for this game was an inspired move – pun intended :-)
Might be interesting to try and get it to display actual hexagons. Significantly more difficult, but significantly more fun.
Ok, I must admit that I’ve never actually played the game, but would the gameplay really change that much by going from circles to hexagons? To me it sounds like a very minor change. The hexagons looks cooler though…
Not really, if you look closely the barriers/walls in this version split along 6 lines anyway. The novelty of it would be the major factor.
That being said, this version does hypothetically allow the barriers to unlock and generate anywhere along the circle unlike the original. So although the shape is less cool, there are more possibilities there.
An “80’s style” game? Only if it can be made to run on some actual 1980’s arcade hardware.
I guess that Tempest would be another game more or less suitable for this kind of circular POV display…
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=10065
I meant more along the lines of how it looks and feels. To me it’s always seemed like “inverse asteroids” if that makes sense. Although if it runs on an Arduino it might not be too hard to port a version to some 80s hardware.
This would be an awesome project for someone in the Vectrex homebrew scene.
You mean like the port of it to the C64? http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62313
Completely awesome!
Pretty cool! I bet your eyes dry out after playing it for awhile
Googles
But they do nothing!
Two player… vary the fan speed to mess with your buddy.
Doesn’t the real game spin and such? One could achieve that by varying fan speed a bit.