Open 3D Engine editor with Amazon Shader Language file and asset from the game Deadhaus Sonata open. (Credit: O3DE project)

Open 3D Engine: Amazon’s Old Clothes Or A Game Engine To Truly Get Excited About?

January 10, 2022 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Recently Amazon announced that they would be open sourcing the 3D engine and related behind their Amazon Lumberyard game tooling effort. As Lumberyard is based on CryEngine 3.8 (~2015 vintage), this raises the question of whether this new open source engine – creatively named Open 3D Engine (O3DE) – is an open source version of a CryTek engine, and what this brings to those of us who like to tinker with 2D, 3D games and similar.

When reading through the marketing materials, one might be forgiven for thinking that O3DE is the best thing since sliced 3D bread, and is Amazon’s benevolent gift to the unwashed masses to free them from the chains imposed on them by proprietary engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. A closer look reveals however that O3DE is Lumberyard, but with many parts of Lumberyard replaced, including the renderer still in the process of being rewritten from the old CryEngine code.

What Makes a Good Game Engine?

My own game development attempts started with the Half Life engine and the Valve Hammer editor, as well as the Doom map editor. This meant that some expectations were set before encountering today’s game engines and their tools. The development experience with the Hammer editor in the late 1990s was pretty much WYSIWYG, and when I was just getting started with Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) a number of years back this was pretty much the same experience, making it relatively easy to hit the ground running. Continue reading “Open 3D Engine: Amazon’s Old Clothes Or A Game Engine To Truly Get Excited About?” →

Raspberry Pi Pico Gets A Tiny Keyboard On Its Back

January 10, 2022 by Tom Nardi 25 Comments

With hackers and makers building custom computing devices that don’t necessarily follow conventional design paradigms, there’s been a growing demand for smaller and smaller keyboards. Many of the cyberdecks we’ve seen over the last couple of years have used so-called 60% or even 40% keyboards, and there’s been a trend towards repurposing BlackBerry keyboards for wearables and other pocket-sized gadgets. But what if you need something even smaller?

Enter this incredibly diminutive keyboard created by [TEC.IST]. With 59 keys crammed into an area scarcely larger than three US pennies, it may well be the smallest keyboard ever made. The PCB has been designed to mount directly onto the back of a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is running some CircuitPython code to read the switch matrix and act as a standard USB Human Interface Device. The board design files as well as the source code for the Pico have been released on the project’s Hackaday.io page, giving you everything you need to spin up your own teeny tiny input device.

The Pi Pico’s castellated pads make attaching the PCB a snap.

Of course, you probably won’t be breaking any speed records when banging out text on this thing. We know from past Hackaday badges that an array of microswitches make for a functional, if somewhat unpleasant, method of text entry.

Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Pico Gets A Tiny Keyboard On Its Back” →

An Apple I hooked up to lab power supplies and a monitor

Powering Up An Original Apple I After Three Decades In A Museum

January 10, 2022 by Robin Kearey 27 Comments

The Apple I is the stuff of legend. Designed and marketed in 1976 by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, it was the very first product released by what would become today’s multi-trillion-dollar manufacturer of iPhones and iMacs. With about 60 original ones known to exist today, prices at auction are commonly in the $300,000 range, while confirmed working ones are even more valuable.

The Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum (HNF), a computer museum in the German city of Paderborn, is fortunate enough to have an original Apple I in its collection. Although it has been there since 1996, it was always on static display and had never been powered on. In fact, it was unknown whether it would even work, and with it being the most valuable exhibit in the entire museum, simply firing it up would be a seriously risky project.

But computers are meant to be used, so museum director [Jochen Viehoff] decided to take the plunge and attempt to get the classic Apple to run again. In the four-part video series embedded below, [Jochen] explains the history of Apple’s first product and the steps he took to bring it back to life. This began with taking it out of its bullet-proof display case and bringing it upstairs to the museum’s workshop.

In order to make a complete system, HNF staff also dug up a period-correct keyboard as well as a slightly newer Apple monitor that could display the 60 Hz composite video output. Hooking up an original power supply would have been way too risky, because a single mistake or malfunction could send their top exhibit up in flames. Instead, they used a set of lab power supplies with a programmable current limit; this way, even a dead short on the PCB would not result in any serious damage.

Not that there were any shorts: after a bit of fiddling with the keyboard and adjusting the video output level, the 45-year-old computer came to life and began to respond to commands. With just 256 bytes of ROM, its default feature set is rather limited, but the computer duly executed a simple “Hello, World” program writen in 6502 machine code. It thereby joined the elite club of confirmed working Apple I’s, of which there are thought to be about twenty.

If you haven’t got $300,000 to spare but would still like to try your hand at programming the Apple I, you’ll be happy to hear that you can get a modern copy at a far more affordable price. And if all that classic hardware is too fiddly for you, you might want to try implementing the Apple I on an FPGA.

Continue reading “Powering Up An Original Apple I After Three Decades In A Museum” →