The Epic Saga Of Hacking Knights Of The Round

June 8, 2021 by 3 Comments

For the uninitiated, Knights of the Round was a hack-and-slash arcade game released by Capcom in 1991 that rather loosely followed the legend of King Arthur and the eponymous Knights of the Round Table. In it, up to three players make their way from stage to stage, vanquishing foes and leveling up their specific character’s weapons and abilities. But [Sebastian Mihai] was looking for a new way to experience this classic title, so he decided to reverse engineer the game and create his own version called Warlock’s Tower.

Those familiar with the original game will no doubt notice some of the differences right away while watching the video below, but for those who don’t have an intimate knowledge of Arthur’s digital adventures, the major changes are listed on the project’s web page. Among the most notable are the removal of cooperative multiplayer and stage time limits. This turns the game from a frantic beat ’em up to a more methodical adventure. Especially since you now have to compete the game in a single life. If we had to guess, we’d say [Sebastian] prefers his games to have a bit of a challenge to them.

Even if you aren’t interested in playing Warlock’s Tower yourself, the story of how [Sebastian] created it is absolutely fascinating. He started with zero knowledge of Motorola 68000 assembly, but by the end of the project, was wrangling multiple debuggers and writing custom tools to help implement the approximately 70 patches that make up the custom build.

The hundreds of hours of work that went into creating these patches is documented as a sort of stream of consciousness on the project page, allowing you to follow along in chronological order. Whether it inspires you to tackle your own reverse engineering project or makes you doubt whether or not you’ve got the patience to see it through, it’s definitely worth a read. If you’re a Knights of the Round fan, you should also take a look at the incredible wealth of information he’s amassed about the original game itself, which honestly serves as an equally impressive project in its own right.

Modified versions of classic games, known colloquially as “ROM hacks” are fairly common among serious fans who want to see their favorite games improved over time. While they aren’t always as ambitious as Warlock’s Tower, they all serve as examples of how a dedicated community can push a product well beyond the scope envisioned by its original creators.

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Tractors And The Right To Repair: It’s Going Global

June 8, 2021 by 65 Comments

For more than a few years now, we’ve been covering the saga of tractors from the larger manufacturers on which all components are locked down by software to the extent that they can only be replaced by officially sanctioned dealers. We’re thus pleased to see a couple of moments when the story has broken out of the field of a few farmers and right-to-repair geeks and into the mainstream. First up:  a segment on the subject from NPR is worth a listen, as the US public radio station interviews a Montana farmer hit by a $5k fuel sensor on his John Deere as a hook form which to examine the issue. Then there is a blog post from the National Farmers Union, the body representing UK farmers, in which they too lay out the situation and also highlight the data-grabbing aspects of these machines.

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An Emulator That Only Plays One Game

June 7, 2021 by 1 Comment

[Ben Smith] had previously implemented a GameBoy Color emulator but decided to make a new emulator that to play just one game called pokegb. The game is, of course, the popular blue edition of Pokemon. While this emulator could play other GameBoy games, the way it was implemented was to support only the opcodes and features that Pokemon Blue used. What’s perhaps even more amazing is that this full emulator is just 582 lines of C++ (using SDL for graphics and input). There is also an obfuscated version that comes in at just 68 lines and in the shape of three Pokeballs. All the code for pokegb can be found on GitHub.

[Ben] goes through a detailed listing of each opcode of the processor, memory, the graphics unit (PPU), and how it interacts with a modern operating system. We love the idea of implementing each opcode one by one and gradually seeing the emulator make it farther and farther through the ROM. The only feature that’s noticeably absent is sound, which would require a significant amount of code to emulate properly.

If you’re interested in a deep dive into the audio chips inside a Gameboy Color, [Ken Shirriff] has already done the research for you.

At MIT, Clothing Fiber Watches You

June 7, 2021 by 11 Comments

[Yoel Fink] and his team at MIT have announced their creation of a fiber that can sense and store data. In addition, they can use data from a shirt made of the material to infer the wearer’s activity with high accuracy. The fiber contains hundreds of microscale silicon chips into a preform used to create a polymer fiber that connects the chips using four 25 micron tungsten wires. You can read the paper directly in Nature Communications.

The fiber contains temperature sensors and enough memory (24CW1280X chips) to store a short movie for two months without power. It also contains 1,650 neural network elements, which means the fiber can train to infer activity itself without additional help.

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Teach Your Air Compressor To Blow Eggs

June 7, 2021 by 16 Comments

As fun as it is to decorate Easter eggs, the road to a hollow hen’s egg is a gross and gooey avenue. Trust us, it sucks to blow out eggs, and it’s hard to get it right. Plus, you know, there’s that whole salmonella thing. [Phil] decided to speed things up this year by using an air compressor to do the dirty work.

Of course, one must approach this problem delicately because eggs are fragile. It would be nice to drill the egg instead of poking the end with a needle, but how are you gonna pull that off without breaking it? As it turns out, all you need is a bench vise, the right piece of PVC, a bit of rubber to keep the egg safe, and some hose clamps to keep the business part together.

[Phil] built a two-stage contraption that serves both purposes — the bottom cup safely cradles the egg for drilling, and the identical top cup connects to the air compressor, which blows the goo out of the bottom hole. [Phil] might have used negative pressure instead, but doesn’t have a vacuum pump or hose. Be sure to check out the brief demo video below.

Don’t want to mess around with real eggs? There are tons of ways to beautify fake eggs, but few of them are as cool as lasers.

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Hi-Fi Combines Best Of 60s And 90s Technology

June 7, 2021 by 55 Comments

The 90s were a dark time for audio equipment, literally and figuratively. Essentially the only redeeming quality from the decade of nondescript black plastic boxes was the low cost. Compared to the audio equipment of the 60s, largely produced in high-end enclosures with highly desirable tube amplifiers, the 90s did not offer much when it came to hi-fi stereo sound. However, those cheap black boxes from the 90s turn out to be surprisingly perfect for project enclosures for other amplifier builds, such as this 60s-era tube amp recreation.

This mesh of the best of two distinct decades comes from [Alvenh] and begins by preparing the old enclosure for its new purpose. This means a lot of work fabricating a custom metal face plate for the new amplifier and significantly modifying the remaining case. After the box is complete, the amplifier build began. It uses a tube-based preamp and a solid-state power amplifier since [Alvenh]’s experience suggested that the warm tube sound was generated mostly in the preamp. This means that his design is a hybrid but still preserves the essential qualities of a full tube build.

The build also includes a radio module that has the ability to cover the 2m and 70cm bands popular in ham radio. This module also has been found to have much better audio quality than the standard AM/FM receiver typically used in projects like this. With the radio module added to the custom enclosure, as well as a phono amp and a power supply, [Alvenh] has an excellent audio amplifier in an inexpensive case which preserves the tube sound from the true hi-fi eras of decades past.

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Portable, Digital Scoreboard Goes Anywhere

June 7, 2021 by 22 Comments

It’s that time of year in both hemispheres — time to get outside and play before it gets unbearably hot (or cold). No matter what your game, don’t keep score in your head or with piles of rocks — make yourself a portable, fold-able scoreboard like [LordGuilly] did and be on the bleeding edge of display technology. It’s really more roll-able than fold-able, which is awesome because you get to unfurl it like a boss.

All you need is a place to hang it up and you’re good to go. This thing runs on a beefy 10,000 mAH USB power bank, and [LordGuilly] says that it’s easy to read even on really sunny days. As you may have guessed, those are WS2812 strips and they are set into rectangular PVC bars. The bars are set equidistant from each other in a frame made from modified version of cable tracks — plastic chain links for cable management.

Good looks aside, we especially like that there are two controller options here. If you want to assign a dedicated scorekeeper, there’s a handled version that uses an STM32 blue pill and is wired to the display. But if you’re short on people, use the ESP8266 version and update the score with the accompanying app. Check out the demo after the break so you can see it in action.

We’ve seen a few scoreboards over the years, including this beauty that’s meant for indoor games.

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