The PiBoy

January 20, 2014 by 22 Comments

piboy

What do you do with a broken Gameboy, a 3″ LCD, a pile of wires, a USB SNES controller, a 32gb SD card, and a Raspberry Pi? You make a pocket emulator, of course!

[Anton] decided he wanted to build an emulator awhile ago. He had a few specific goals in mind: it had to be hand-held, portable, child safe, and usable without a keyboard. He started by stripping the broken Gameboy down to its external shell, then removing all of the internal plastic mounting features with a hot soldering iron. Next was the challenge of fitting everything into the case and powering it. Because his 3″ LCD runs off 12V, [Anton] needed a way to get 5V to the Pi. Lucky for him, it turned out that his LCD’s controller board had a 5V test point/expansion pin-out!

From there it was just a matter of reusing the original Gameboy’s speaker, closing up the case, and loading the emulator! As always, there’s a demo video after the break.

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Linux On A Leapster For Classic Video Game Emulation

November 8, 2013 by 20 Comments

Christmas is coming, and if you have nieces, nephews, or ankle biters of your own roaming your house, you’re probably wondering how you’ll be subsidizing Santa this year. it looks like Toys R Us will be selling the Leapfrog LeapsterGS for $30 on Black Friday this year. It’s a Linux device running on a 550 MHz ARM 9, with 128 MB of RAM and 2 GB of Flash. Overpowered for a children’s toy, but perfect for when the kids forget about it in a month, because now you can replace the firmware with a proper Linux install and run classic emulators.

Putting Linux on these cheap handhelds made for children isn’t anything new; we’ve seen it done with the Leapfrog DIDJ and the Leapfrog Explorer. Those consoles, however, had rather anemic CPUs and not a whole lot of RAM. Moore’s Law finally kicked in for stocking stuffers, it seems, and the Leapster GS is powerful enough to play all those Nintendo, Game Boy and even MAME games.

All that’s needed to flash the new firmware is soldering a few wires onto the LeapsterGS’ board for a serial connection. The new LeapsterGS firmware even has an MP3 and movie player, so even if the recipient of one of these machines grows tired of it in a week, there’s still a lot of life left in it.

Video of the LeapsterGS playing the greatest arcade game below.

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How The Game Genie Works

October 7, 2013 by 39 Comments

Those of us old enough to remember blowing into cartridges will probably remember the Game Genie – a device that plugs in to an NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, or Game Boy that gives the player extra lives, items, changes the difficulty, or otherwise modifies the gameplay. To someone who doesn’t yet know where the 1-up is in the first level of Super Mario Bros., the Game Genie seems magical. There is, of course, a rhyme and reason behind the Genie and [The Mighty Mike Master] put together a great walkthrough of how the Game Genie works.

There are two varieties of Game Genie codes – 6-character codes and 8-character codes. Both these types of codes translate into a 15-bit address in the game ROM (from 0x8000 to 0xFFFF for the 6502-based NES) and a data byte. For the 6-character codes, whenever the address referenced by the Game Genie code is accessed, a specific data byte is returned. Thus, infinite lives become a reality with just a 6-character code.

Some games, especially ones made in the late years of their respective systems, use memory mapping to increase the code and data provided on the cartridges. Since areas of data are constantly being taken in and out of the CPU’s address space, merely returning a set value whenever a specific address is accessed would be disastrous. For this bank-switching setup, the Game Genie uses an 8-bit code; it’s just like the 6-bit code, only with the addition of a ‘compare’ byte. Using an 8-bit code, the Game Genie returns a specific byte if the compare bytes are equal. Otherwise, the Genie lets hands off the original data to the CPU.

Of course, all this information could be gleaned from the original patent for the Game Genie. As for the circuitry inside the Game Genie, there’s really not much aside from an un-Googleable GAL (general array logic) and a tiny epoxied microcontroller. It’s an amazingly simple device for all the amazement it imbued in our young impressionable minds.

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Manual Transmission For Gamers

July 7, 2013 by 53 Comments

manual-transmission-for-gamers

If that stick shift just doesn’t feel right in your hand it’s time for a change. This hack puts a gaming joystick in the center console of your hoopty as a gear shifter.

[Ilias] used a joystick from about 1991 to replace the stock shifter. It jogs our memory when he mentions that this thing saw a lot of use playing X-wing vs. Tie Fighter. Boy did we burn up a ton of time playing that one too! He actually broke the stock part getting it off (find a shop manual for your car if you’re afraid of this). But once the grip was removed he was relieved to find the joystick fit perfectly. The two molded plastic halves of the joystick screw together. To join them with the shifting level he used epoxy putty.

The momentary push switch for that thumb button is still in there. But it doesn’t look like he hooked it up to anything. If we were to give this one a try we’d have to find some use for it. Got any suggestions? Let us know in the comments.

3D Printed Pip-Boy, Geiger Counter Not Included

July 1, 2013 by 27 Comments

pip

Yes, we all love portal guns and crowbars, but there’s one piece of video game paraphernalia that could conceivably be a useful piece of hardware for the modern technologist. It’s the Pip-Boy 3000, the wrist-wearable computer from Fallout, and now you can print on on your 3D printer.

All the pieces for this Pip-Boy are available over on Thingiverse. Included in those files are a dozen plastic parts that, when assembled, come together to form a wrist-mounted computer. You could, of course, print out a static image of a Pip-Boy screen for this build, but [dragonator] made a little addition to his model – he put in a space for a smartphone, so all your environmental sensors and inventory management also work with this 3D printed model.

This is far from the first wearable Pip-Boy we’ve seen, but it is the first that’s able to be fabricated on a 3D printer, and comes with the nice bonus of being the best phone case ever. It’s still a lot of work to put this together, but we’re going to say the results are fantastic.

You can check out the demo video of the Pip-Boy below.

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Giving The VirtualBoy A VGA Out

June 17, 2013 by 19 Comments

Nintendo’s VirtualBoy – the odd console-inside-a-pair-of-goggles  and arguable ancestor of Nintendo’s 3DS – was a marvelous piece of technology for its time. In a small tabletop unit, you were able to play true 3D video games at an impressive 384 x 224 pixel resolution. Of course the VirtualBoy was a complete failure, but that doesn’t mean hardware tinkerers are leaving this wonderful system to video game collectors. [furrtek] has been playing around with his VirtualBoy and managed to add VGA out.

As a 3D system with two displays, any sort of video out was rightfully ignored by the VirtualBoy system designers. Still, [furrtek] wanted some sort of video out on his system, so he began poking around with a small FPGA board to generate some VGA signals.

The two displays inside the VirtualBoy aren’t your normal LCD display – as seen in this iFixit teardown. they’re really two linear LED arrays that generate a single line of 244 pixels, with mirrors scanning the line in the in the Y axis. These LED arrays are controlled by the VirtualBoy CPU through a series of shift registers, and by carefully tapping the lines of each LED array, [furrtek] was able to copy all the image data into the RAM of an FPGA.

After stuffing an XESS XULA-200 FPGA board inside the case of his VirtualBoy, [furrtek] wired up a few resistors for a DAC and installed a VGA out port on the underside of his console. Everything worked the first time he powered it up, and he began playing his VirtualBoy on his big screen TV.

Because [furrtek] is only reading one of the VirtualBoy’s displays, all the 3D data – and the main feature of the VirtualBoy – is lost when it’s displayed on a TV. 3D TVs do exist, though, and we’d love to see an improved version of this that captures data from both of the VirtualBoy displays.

You can see [furrtek]’s video of his mod in action below.

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Playing Meat Boy On An FPGA

March 26, 2013 by 11 Comments

We usually look at these FPGA University projects and think how much fun it must have been to get credit for the work. But in this case we can’t image the grind it must have been to implement the game mechanics of Meat Boy in an FPGA. See how well it came out in the clip after the break.

Remember that with an FPGA you’re basically building hardware devices by using code. The Reddit discussion of the project sheds some light on where to start (and even shares the source code). The Altera DE2 is pushing the game to a monitor using SXGA at 60Hz. The map is laid out as a collection of 32×32 tiles, each represented by 2 bits in memory. [SkipToThe3nd] does go into detail about how the physics work but we can’t even begin to paraphrase that part of the discussion.

The game being cloned here is Meat Boy, the Flash game predecessor to Super Meat Boy. If you’ve never heard of the title we’d suggest watching Indie Game: The Movie, a documentary which follows several independent game developers as they try to get their titles to market.

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