LED cubes are all the rage right now, and rightly so given the amount of work that goes into them and the interesting things people find to do with them. Not content to make yet another position-sensitive display or an abstract design, though, [Greig Stewart] opted for something a bit more ambitious: an LED cube with a playable game of Castlevania.
As ambitious projects often do, this one required leveraging the previous art, some of which we’ve featured before. [Greig] pulled inspiration and information from cube builders like [polyfloyd], [Greg Davill], and [kbob] to put the six 64-LED matrix panels to work. Getting the structural elements figured out was an early stumbling block, but [Greig] pulled it off with 3D-printed brackets and a hinge that’s a work of art in itself; the whole thing looks like something the Borg would have built. The Raspberry Pi inside made a Gameboy emulator possible, and his first stab at it was to have six different games running at once, one on each panel. He settled on just one game, the classic side-scroller Castlevania, played on just four of the panels. Some wizardry was required to de-scroll the game so that the character walks around the cube rather than having the background scroll; you can check out the results in the clip below.
Currently, the cube sits on a lazy susan with a small motor controlling the swiveling in response to a foot control. [Greig] wants to put the motor under control of the game so that physical scrolling is synced with gameplay; we heartily endorse that plan and look forward to the results.
Nice video, but unfortunately no info about current consumption and cost.
About 60 dollar per panel, guess the pi also does cost. So ~500 dollar for everything I guess from the part list.
No, what is really amazing, is that the whole thing is running on javascript.
lol, i bought one of those panels and it did cost me 25 bucks
Castlevania was first released on the NES/Famicom, not on the GameBoy. And the GameBoy version would have been in four shades of grey, not colour.
The original Castlevania was ported to the Gameboy Advance in the NES Classics series. That look sto be the version used here.
Gameboy Advance != Gameboy DMG
My jaw dropped when it started spinning. That’s the neatest trick. I’m hoping there will be mass production of the panels for things like this eventually. I’ve seen stuff about Greg’s cube on Twitter and that’s a lot of work for just one side, let alone 6…
“Mass production of the panels”
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3649
Not like this?
these panels are already mass produced for giant advertising screens, i bought one in china for 25 bucks 64 x 64 pixels
FEZ
Brilliant idea and execution.
Castlevania is my favorite videogame, specifically 3. I need this thing in my house right now!