Dante’s Inferno Arcade Reveals Your True Fate

October 31, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 6 Comments

Many of us are vaguely familiar with the levels of hell described in Dante’s epic poem from the 14th century, even if we’ve never visited ourselves. It’s natural to wonder in which circle of hell one might end up, but that’s a question that [scubabear’s] arcade build seeks to answer.

The stand-up cabinet was built for The Magic Castle, Hollywood’s exclusive private club for the magic set. The design is loosely inspired by old-fashioned love testers, the sort of which you might have seen in that Simpsons episode. The club has traditionally issued members with unique RFID tags in keychains, which can be used to trigger special objects in the facility. In this case, when a member scans their keychain and places their hand on a handprint, the machine starts up.

The hand is detected by an Adafruit touch sensor board, and the machine begins determining the fate of the member while playing a short musical interlude. Once calculated by the Raspberry Pi within, the user’s name is read out based on the RFID data, and their destiny is read aloud. They’re then given a receipt stating their destination in hell, along with a quote from Dante’s Inferno.

It’s a fun game and one that we’d love to try out if we find ourselves visiting The Magic Castle one spooky day. It’s made all the better by the sheer quality of the cabinet and the associated illustrations from [Jeremy Owen.]

For those keen to do something similar, [scubabear] hasn’t skimped on the details of the construction nor the electronics that make it all work. We’ve seen other great builds too, from the carefully crafted to the glowiest you’ve ever seen. Video after the break.

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Modified Toggle Switches Grace Hyper-Detailed Cockpit Simulator Panels

October 30, 2021 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

In the world of the cockpit simulator hobby, no detail is too small to obsess over. Getting the look and feel of each and every cockpit control just right is important, and often means shelling out for cockpit-accurate parts. But not always, as these DIY magnetically captured toggle switches show.

Chances are good you’ve seen [The Warthog Project]’s fantastically detailed A-10 Thunderbolt II cockpit simulator before; we’ve featured it recently, and videos from the ongoing build pop up regularly in our feeds. The sim addresses the tiniest of details, including the use of special toggle switches that lock into place automatically using electromagnets. They’re commercially available, but only for those with very deep pockets — depending on the supplier, up to several thousand dollars per unit!

The homebrew substitute is mercifully cheap and easy to build, though — a momentary DPST toggle switch is partially gutted, with a length of nail substituted for one of its poles. The nail sticks out of the back of the switch, where a bracket holds a small electromagnet. When energized, the electromagnet holds the nail firmly when the switch is toggled on; the simulated pilot can still manually toggle the switch off, or it can be released automatically by de-energizing the coil. Each switch cost less than $20 to make, including the MOSFETs needed to drive the coils and the Arduino to provide the logic. The panels they adorn look fantastic, and the switches add a level of functional detail that’s just right for the whole build.

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Fixing A Broken Game Installer By Sheer Force Of Will

October 29, 2021 by Zoe Skyforest 25 Comments

These days, we seldom purchase games on physical media. Even when buying titles from yesteryear, we usually download them from an online service. Some of these older games haven’t been properly ported to their new delivery platform, as [Slortibort] found out. Thus, it was time to dive into the game files and sort the problem out.

The game in question was the Hammers of Fate expansion pack for the base game Heroes of Might and Magic V. [Slortibort’s] partner bought it from Ubisoft, and ran the installer. However, the installer would report that it couldn’t find the original files from the base game, and fail to start.

Fixing the issue was no mean feat, requiring use of the Sexy Installshield Decompiler to dive into the guts of the installer to see what was going wrong. In the end, it came down to some registry key shenanigans, but the route of how [Slortibort] got there is well worth the read.

It’s a fine example of some of the issues around moving games to digital distribution; proper attention must be paid to do it right. Even then, there’s always the risk you’ll lose your games down the track. There are benefits, of course, but there’s always a tradeoff to be made.

RC Minecraft Boat Patrols The Pool For Treasure

October 28, 2021 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Looking to recreate those relaxing Minecraft fishing sessions in real life, [electrosync] recently set out to 3D print himself a blocky remote controlled boat, complete with a similarly cubic occupant to ride in it. Each element of the build, from the oars to the bobber on the end of the fishing line, has been designed to look as faithful to the source material as possible. In fact, the whole thing is so accurate to the game that it’s almost surreal to see it rowing around the pool.

That said, some of the resemblance is only skin deep. For example the rowing action, though it appears to be properly synchronized to the boat’s movement through the water, is completely for show. A standard propeller and rudder arrangement under the boat provide propulsion and directional control, and [electrosync] notes its actually powerful enough to push the boat very near to its scale top speed from the game, despite the exceptionally poor hydrodynamics of what’s essentially just a rectangle.

Speaking of which, [electrosync] even went through the trouble of printing the hull in wood-fill PLA and coating it in polyester resin to make sure it was watertight. Granted he could have just made the boat out of wood in the first place, saving himself the nearly 60 hours it took to print the hull parts, but that would have been cheating.

Beyond the servos and motors that move the boat and the oars, [electrosync] had to give his 3D printed fisherman a considerable amount of dexterity. Servos embedded into the 3D printed parts allow “Steve” to rotate at the hips and raise and lower his arm. With a fishing pole slipped into a hole printed into the hand, he’s able to cast out his magnetic bobber and see whats biting.

We’ve actually seen quite a number of projects that allow virtual objects inside Minecraft to interact with the real world, but comparatively few efforts to recreate objects from the game’s blocky universe, so the change of pace is nice.

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GamecubePC Puts a PC into a Gamecube chassis

GamecubePC Packs Plenty Of Punch Into GameCube Plastics

October 28, 2021 by Ryan Flowers 2 Comments

If reading Hackaday teaches us anything, it’s that there is a subset of hackers who take things like emulator builds a step farther than most. [RetroModder] is very clearly one such hacker. Enter the GamecubePC, which you can read about on Hackaday.io. The GamecubePC is a multi-year project that aims to stuff an entire Windows 10 PC into a GameCube shell while still being able to play Wii and GameCube titles at native resolution and performance.

Internals of the GamecubePC with all the custom chassis and PCB's on display — Internals of the GamecubePC with all the custom chassis and PCB’s on display

Although it only takes a spare computer and the Dolphin emulator to make a GameCube and Wii emulator, great attention has been paid to keeping the GameCube at the forefront. Contributing to the illusion is the preservation of the original GameCube power switch and reset buttons by way of custom PCB’s that interface the parts to the mSTX motherboard.

The bottom of the GameCube shell is replaced with a 3D printed base that mounts the motherboard while smartly giving access to the motherboard’s front panel. The minuscule motherboard sports an Intel Core™ i5-7600 with 8GB memory, and SSD storage. Topping off the experience are four functional controller ports that can be switched to be used with the emulator or with PC games too. Surely the GamecubePC will be the subject of many double takes!

Custom game builds are no stranger to Hackaday, and you might appreciate this portable Wii that can play Wii and GameCube games or this GameCube controller hacked into a Joycon for the Nintendo Switch.

Edit from the far future: it’s now a project on Tindie. Check it out.

A troublesome Triple-Z80 arcade board requires negative voltage for audio output

Vintage Arcade Used Negative Voltage To Turn Volume Up To 11

October 27, 2021 by Ryan Flowers 50 Comments

When [Nicole Express] got her hands on the logic board for the 1986 SNK arcade game Athena, she ran into a rather thorny problem: The board expected to be fed negative five volts! [Nicole]’s analysis of the problem and a brilliant solution are outlined in her well written blog post.

[Nicole]’s first task was to find out which devices need negative voltage. She found that the negative five volts was being fed through a capacitor to the ground pins on the Mitsubishi M151516L, an obscure 12 W audio amplifier. After finding the data sheet, she realized something strange: the amp didn’t call for negative voltage at all! A mystery was afoot.

To fully understand the problem, she considered a mid-1980’s arcade and its cacophony of sounds. How would a manufacturer make their arcade game stand out? By making it louder, obviously! And how did they make their game louder than the rest?

The answer lays in the requirement for negative five volts. The amplifier is still powered with a standard 12 V supply on its VCC pin. But with ground put at -5 V, the voltage potential is increased from 12 V to 17 V without overpowering the chip. The result is a louder game to draw more players and their fresh stacks of quarters.

How was [Nicole Express] to solve the problem? ATX PSU’s stopped providing -5 V after the ISA slot disappeared from PC’s, so that wouldn’t work. She could have purchased an expensive arcade style PSU, but that’s not her style. Instead, she employed a wonderful little hack: a charge pump circuit. A charge pump works by applying positive voltage to a capacitor. Then the capacitor is quickly disconnected from power, and the input and ground are flipped, an equal but negative voltage is found on its opposite plate. If this is done with a high enough frequency, a steady -5 V voltage can be had from a +5 V input. [Nicole Express] found a voltage inverter IC (ICL7660) made just for the purpose and put it to work.

The IC doesn’t supply enough power to get 12 W out of the amplifier, and so the resulting signal is fed into an external amplifier. Now [Nicole]’s arcade game has sound and she can play Athena from the original arcade board, 1986 style!

Arcades are few and far between these days, but that doesn’t mean you can’t introduce your young ones to the joys of dropping a quarter or two, or build a gorgeous oak Super Mario Bros cabinet complete with pixel art inlays. Do you have a favorite hack to share? Be sure let us know via the Tip Line!

POLF: Retro 3D Game Uses Only A Character Display

October 18, 2021 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

Got a retrocomputing itch? So does [David Given], and luckily for us all he indulged it by writing POLF: a first-person 3D game for the Commodore PET that uses only the system’s 40×25 text mode character display for visuals. It’s a fantastic achievement, considering that the 80s-era computer boasts 32 kB of memory and doesn’t even have a graphical display.

Each level in POLF is a small, maze-like room in which one’s goal is to play a sort of cross between billiards and golf, aiming to move the round “ball” object into the square “hole” object. The 3D view is rendered using raycasting, which is a way of efficiently drawing a workable 3D perspective using limited resources. Raycasting can only do so much, but as a method it works fantastically within its limitations, and there are useful tutorials out there that lay the process bare.

The GitHub repository for the project is here, and it should run on any 40-column screen PET with at least 16 kB of RAM. Watch it in action in the video, embedded below. (Hint: the little bar graphs under the compass headings at the bottom of the screen represent the player’s proximity to the ball and hole objects. )

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