Nothing lasts forever, and that includes the ROMs required to make a retrocomputer run. Even worse, what if you’re rolling your own firmware? Period-appropriate EPROMs and their programmers aren’t always cheap or easy to get a hold of these days. [Kyo-ta04] had that problem, and thanks to them, we now all have a solution: Pico2ROMEmu, a ROM emulator based on, you guessed it, the Raspberry Pi Pico2.
The site is called Hackaday, and has been for 21 years. But it was only for maybe the first half-year that it was literally a hack a day. By the 2010s, we were putting out four or more per day, and in the later 20-teens, we settled into our current cadence of eight hacks per day, plus some original pieces over the top. That’s a lot of hacks per day! (But “Eight-to-Ten-Hacks-a-Day” just isn’t as catchy.)
With that many posts daily, we also tend to reach out to a broader array of interests. Quite simply, not every hack is necessarily going to be just exactly what you are looking for, but we wouldn’t be writing it up if we didn’t think that someone was looking for it. Maybe you don’t like CAN bus hacks, but you’re into biohacking, or retrocomputing. Our broad group of writers helps to make sure that we’ll get you covered sooner or later.
What’s still surprising to me, though, is that a couple of times per week, there is a hack that is actually relevant to a particular project that I’m currently working on. It’s one thing to learn something new every day, and I’d bet that I do, but it’s entirely another to learn something new and relevant.
So I shouldn’t have been shocked when Tom and I were going over the week’s hacks on the podcast, and he picked an investigation of injecting spray foam into 3D prints. I liked that one too, but for me it was just “learn something new”. Tom has been working on an underwater ROV, and it perfectly scratched an itch that he has – how to keep the top of the vehicle more buoyant, while keeping the whole thing waterproof.
That kind of experience is why I’ve been reading Hackaday for 21 years now, and it’s all of our hope that you get some of that too from time to time. There is a lot of “new” on the Internet, and that’s a wonderful thing. But the combination of new and relevant just can’t be beat! So if you’ve got anything you want to hear more about, let us know.
If you wanted to build an electronic dice, you might grab an Arduino and a nice OLED display to whip up something fancy. You could even choose an ESP32 and have it log your rolls to the cloud. Or, you could follow the lead of [Axiometa] and do it the old-school way.
Continue reading “Electronic Dice Built The Old Fashioned Way”
[Engineezy] might have been watching a 3D printer move when inspiration struck: Why not build a robot arm to clean up his workbench? Why not, indeed? Well, all you need is a 17-foot-long X-axis and a gripper mechanism that can pick up any strange thing that happens to be on the bench.
Like any good project, he did it step by step. Mounting a 17-foot linear rail on an accurately machined backplate required professional CNC assistance. He was shooting for a 1mm accuracy, but decided to settle for 10mm.
The Amiga was a great game system in its day, but there were some titles it was just never going to get. Sonic the Hedgehog was one of them– SEGA would never in a million years been willing to port its flagship platformer to another system. Well, SEGA might not in a million years, but [reassembler] has started that process after only thirty four.
Both the SEGA Mega Drive (that’s the Genesis for North Americans) and Amiga have Motorola 68k processors, but that doesn’t mean you can run code from one on the other: the memory maps don’t match, and the way graphics are handled is completely different. The SEGA console uses so-called “chunky” graphics, which is how we do it today. Amiga, on the other hand, is all about the bitplanes; that’s why it didn’t get a DOOM port back in the day, which may-or-may not be what killed the platform.
In this first video of what promises to be a series, [reassembler] takes us through his process of migrating code from the Mega Drive to Amiga, starting specifically with the SEGA loading screen animation, with a preview of the rest of the work to come. While watching someone wrestle with 68k assembler is always interesting, the automation he’s building up to do it with python is the real star here. Once this port is done, that toolkit should really grease the wheels of bringing other Mega Drive titles over.
It should be noted that since the Mega Drive was a 64 colour machine, [reassembler] is targeting the A1200 for his Sonic port, at least to start. He plans to reprocess the graphics for a smaller-palette A500 version once that’s done. That’s good, because it would be a bit odd to have a DOOM-clone for the A500 while being told a platformer like Sonic is too much to ask. If anyone can be trusted to pull this project off, it’s [reassembler], whose OutRun: Amiga Edition is legendary in the retro world, even if we seem to have missed covering it.
If only someone had given us a tip off, hint hint.
Continue reading “Blue Hedgehog, Meet Boing Ball: Can Sonic Run On Amiga?”
Like many classic board games, Ludo offers its players numerous opportunities to inflict frustration on other players. Despite this, [Viktor Takacs] apparently enjoys it, which motivated him to build a thoroughly modernized, LED-based, WiFi-enabled game board for it (GitHub repository).
The new game board is built inside a stylish 3D-printed enclosure with a thin white front face, under which the 115 LEDs sit. Seven LEDs in the center represent a die, and the rest mark out the track around the board and each user’s home row. Up to six people can play on the board, and different colors of the LEDs along the track represent their tokens’ positions. To prevent light leaks, a black plastic barrier surrounds each LED. Each player has one button to control their pieces, with a combination of long and short presses serving to select one of the possible actions.
The electronics themselves are mounted on seven circuit boards, which were divided into sections to reduce their size and therefore their manufacturing cost. For component placement reasons, [Viktor] used a barrel connector instead of USB, but for more general compatibility also created an adapter from USB-C to a barrel plug. The board is controlled by an ESP32-S3, which hosts a server that can be used to set game rules, configure player colors, save and load games, and view statistics for the game (who rolled the most sixes, who sent other players home most often, etc.).
If you prefer your games a bit more complex, we’ve also seen electronics added to Settlers of Catan. On a rather larger scale, there is also this LED-based board game which invites humans onto the board itself. Continue reading “Adding Electronics To A Classic Game”
One of the most influential inventions of the 20th century was Big Mouth Billy Bass. A celebrity bigger than the biggest politicians or richest movie stars, there’s almost nothing that could beat Billy. That is, until [Kiara] from Kiara’s Workshop built a Magikarp version of Big Mouth Billy Bass.
Sizing in at over 2 entire feet, the orange k-carp is able to dance, it is able to sing, and it is able to stun the crowd. Magikarp functions the same way as its predecessor; a small button underneath allows the show to commence. Of course, this did not come without its challenges.
Starting the project was easy, just a model found online and some Blender fun to create a basic mold. Dissecting Big Mouth Billy Bass gave direct inspiration for how to construct the new idol in terms of servos and joints. Programming wasn’t even all that much with the use of Bottango for animations. Filling the mold with the silicone filling proved to be a bit more of a challenge.
After multiple attempts with some minor variations in procedure, [Kirara] got the fish star’s skin just right. All it took was a paint job and some foam filling to get the final touches. While this wasn’t the most mechanically challenging animatronic project, we have seen our fair share of more advanced mechanics. For example, check out this animatronic that sees through its own eyes!
