Games

690 Articles

Cracking Abandonware DRM Like It’s 1999

August 17, 2025 by 10 Comments

As long as there have been games, there have been crackers breaking their copy protections. “Digital Rights Management” or DRM, is a phrase for copy protection coined near the end of the 1990s, and subverted shortly thereafter. But how? [Nathan Baggs] show us what it took to be a cracker in the year 2000, as the first step to get an old game going again turned out to be cracking it. 

The game in question is “Michelin Rally Masters: Race of Champions” by DICE, a studio that was later subsumed by EA and is today best known as the developers of the Battlefield franchise. The game as acquired from an abandonware site does not run in a virtual machine, and after a little de-obfuscation of the code causing the crash, [Nathan] discovers LaserLock is to blame. LaserLock was a DRM tool to lock down a game to its original CD-ROM that dates all the way back to 1995. Counters to LaserLock were probably well-known in the community back in the day, but in 2025, [Nathan] walks us through attempting to crack it it from first principles.

We won’t spoil the whole assembly-poking adventure, but the journey does involve unboxing an original CD to be able to compare what’s happening when the disc is physically present compared to running from the ISO. Its tedious work and can only be partially automated. Because it did prove so involved, [Nathan]’s original aim — getting the game to work in Windows 11 — remains unfulfilled so far.

Perhaps he’d have had better luck if he’d been listening to the appropriate music. Frustrating DRM isn’t always this hard; sometimes all you needed was a paperclip. Continue reading “Cracking Abandonware DRM Like It’s 1999” →

PCB Business Card Plays Pong, Attracts Employer

August 13, 2025 by 11 Comments

Facing the horrifying realization that he’s going to graduate soon, EE student [Colin Jackson] AKA [Electronics Guy] needed a business card. Not just any business card: a PCB business card. Not just any PCB business card: a PCB business card that can play pong.

[Colin] was heavily inspired by the card [Ben Eater] was handing out at OpenSauce last year, and openly admits to copying the button holder from it. We can’t blame him: the routed-out fingers to hold a lithium button cell were a great idea. The original idea, a 3D persistence-of-vision display, was a little too ambitious to fit on a business card, so [Colin] repurposed the 64 LED matrix and STM32 processor to play Pong. Aside from the LEDs and the microprocessor, it looks like the board has a shift register to handle all those outputs and a pair of surface-mount buttons.

Of course you can’t get two players on a business card, so the microprocessor is serving as the opponent. With only 64 LEDs, there’s no room for score-keeping — but apparently even the first, nonworking prototype was good enough to get [Colin] a job, so not only can we not complain, we offer our congratulations.

The video is a bit short on detail, but [Colin] promises a PCB-business card tutorial at a later date. If you can’t wait for that, or just want to see other hackers take on the same idea, take a gander at some of the entries to last year’s Business Card Challenge. Continue reading “PCB Business Card Plays Pong, Attracts Employer” →

Keyboard Hero: A Barebones Alternative To The Guitar Version

August 3, 2025 by 9 Comments

Guitar Hero was all the rage for a few years, before the entire world apparently got sick of it overnight. Some diehards still remember the charms of rhythm games, though. Among them you might count [Joseph Valenti] and [Daniel Rodriguez], who built a Keyboard Hero game for their ECE 4760 class at Cornell.

Keyboard Hero differs quite fundamentally from Guitar Hero in one major way. Rather than having the player tackle a preset series of “notes,” the buttons to press are instead procedurally generated by the game based on incoming audio input. It only works with simple single-instrument piano music, but it does indeed work. A Raspberry Pi Pico is charged with analyzing incoming audio and assigning the proper notes. Another Pi Pico generates the VGA video output with the game graphics, which is kept in sync with the audio pumped out from the first Pico so the user can play the notes in time with the music. Rather than a guitar controller, Keyboard Hero instead relies on five plastic buttons assembled on a piece of wood. It works.

It’s obviously not as refined as the game that inspired it, but the procedural generation of “notes” reminds us of old-school rhythm game Audiosurf. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Keyboard Hero: A Barebones Alternative To The Guitar Version” →

Squishy Beyblades Made With 3D Printer Fail To Compete In The Arena

August 2, 2025 by 7 Comments

When Beyblades first came out a couple of decades ago, they quickly became a fad across Japan and several Western countries. There was a whole ecosystem of parts that you could buy and use to build competitive fighting spinning tops. These days, though — 3D printers are ubiquitous. There’s very little stopping you from printing whatever Beyblade-compatible parts your heart desires, as [JettKuso] demonstrates.

For [JettKuso], the rubber attack tips were a personal favorite. They had high grip on the plastic arena floor and would allow a top to make rapid, aggressive moves that would knock other tops out of the arena. Not desiring to import specific Beyblade parts at great expense, he decided to print some rubber tips and associated parts instead. The result? Squishy Beyblades!

[JettKuso] built various tops with official and custom TPU parts, and put them in battles to see what worked and what didn’t. In many cases, the TPU replacement parts didn’t make a big difference or proved worse than the standard parts. However, when [JettKuso] got crazy, he found one thing that kind of worked. A mega-heavy TPU top blade, which weighed as much as the standard metal rings, was able to successfully win battles against less competitive standard builds.

Ultimately, the video serves as a testament to the developers of the original toys themselves. It’s not so simple to just print up some parts and have them be competitive with the tried-and-tested gear that comes off the store shelves. The experience ultimately gave [JettKuso] a greater appreciation for all the thought that went into the commercial toys. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Squishy Beyblades Made With 3D Printer Fail To Compete In The Arena” →

Tetris In A Single Line Of Code

July 29, 2025 by 18 Comments

PC gaming in the modern era has become a GPU measuring contest, but back when computers had far fewer resources, every sprite had to be accounted for. To many, this was peak gaming. So let’s look to the greats of [Martin Hollis, David Moore, and Olly Betts], who had the genius (or insanity) to create Tetris in a single BBC BASIC line.

Created in 1992, one-line Tetris serves as a great use of the limited resources available. The entirety of the game fits within 257 bytes. With the age of BASIC, the original intent of the game for BBC BASIC was to be played on computers similar to Acorn’s BBC microcomputer or Archimedes.

One line Tetris has all the core features of the original game. Moving left, right, and rotating all function like the traditional game, most of the time. Being created in a single line, there were a few corners cut with bug fixing. Bugs such as crashing every 136 years of play due to large numbers or holding all keys causing the tetrominoes to freeze make it an interesting play experience. However, as long as our GPUs are long enough to play, we don’t mind.

If you want to experience the most densely coded gaming experience possible but don’t have one of the BBC BASIC computers of old, make sure to try this emulator with a copy of the game. Considering the amount done in a single line of BBC BASIC, the thought may come into mind on what could be done with MORE than a SINGLE line of code. For those with this thought, check out the capabilities of the coding language with modern hardware.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!

A History Of Pong

July 28, 2025 by 8 Comments

Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as the first one we’d heard of: Pong.

The truth is, Pong wasn’t the first video game. We suspect that many people might have had the idea, but Ralph Baer is most associated with inventing a practical video game. As a young engineer in 1951, he tried to convince his company to invest in games that you could play on your TV set. They didn’t like the idea, but Ralph would remember the concept and act on it over a decade later.

But was it really the first time anyone had thought of it? Perhaps not. Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent in 1947 for a game that simulated launching missiles at targets with an oscilloscope display. The box took eight tubes and, being an oscilloscope, was a vector graphic device. The targets were physical dots on a screen overlay. These “amusement devices” were very expensive, and they only produced handmade prototypes.

Continue reading “A History Of Pong” →

A Non-Sony Playstation Motherboard Replacement

July 27, 2025 by 12 Comments

As hardware ages, it becomes harder and harder to keep it in service. Whether that’s because of physical aging or lack of support from the company who built it in the first place, time is not generally good for electronics, especially when it comes to our beloved retro gaming systems. The first Playstation, for example, is starting to see some of the deleterious effects of having originally been built in the 90s, and [LorentioB] has a new, third-party motherboard to bring to the table to keep these systems online as well as adding some features in that Sony removed.

The motherboard is known as the nsOne, meaning Not Sony’s One since this is the first motherboard built by a single person outside of Sony. It’s not based on any FPGAs or emulators and is completely compatible with all of the original hardware, chips, and other circuitry of the original Playstation. Based on the PU-23 series, it even revives the removed parallel port, which Sony removed after the first versions of the hardware because of region locking concerns and other pro-consumer issues. Every chip footprint and connector was reverse engineered manually, using optical sanding, scanning, and net-by-net tracing.

For such a complex piece of hardware this is quite the feat, and for anyone who wants to restore old hardware or add the parallel port back on to their system this could be a game changer. [LorentioB] is not quite finished yet but hopes to have a finished version shortly. As far as fully opening up the system goes, there are some software hacks to look at that allow more games to run on the system and some hardware hacks that open the system up as well.