Handheld Console Plays Original Pong With Modern E-Waste

March 24, 2025 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

[Simon] wrote in to let us know about DingPong, his handheld portable Pong console. There’s a bit more to it than meets the eye, however. Consider for a moment that back in the 1970s playing Pong required a considerable amount of equipment, not least of which was dedicated electronics and a CRT monitor. What was huge (in more than one way) in the 70s has been shrunk down to handheld, and implemented almost entirely on modern e-waste in the process.

The 1970s would be blown away by a handheld version of Pong, made almost entirely from salvaged components.

DingPong is housed in an old video doorbell unit (hence the name) and the screen is a Sony Video Watchman, a portable TV from 1982 with an amazing 4-inch CRT whose guts [Simon] embeds into the enclosure. Nearly everything in the build is either salvaged, or scrounged from the junk bin. Components are in close-enough values, and power comes from nameless lithium-ion batteries that are past their prime but still good enough to provide about an hour of runtime. The paddle controllers? Two pots (again, of not-quite-the-right values) sticking out the sides of the unit, one for each player.

At the heart of DingPong one will not find any flavor of Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or ESP32. Rather, it’s built around an AY-3-8500 “Ball & paddle” (aka ‘Pong’) integrated circuit from 1977, which means DingPong plays the real thing!

We have seen Pong played on a Sony Watchman before, and we’ve also seen a vintage Pong console brought back to life, but we’re pretty sure this is the first time we’ve seen a Sony Watchman running Pong off a chip straight from the 70s. Watch it in action in the video (in German), embedded below.

Continue reading “Handheld Console Plays Original Pong With Modern E-Waste” →

Next time on Star Trek: EmptyEpsilon... (Credit: EmptyEpsilon project)

Build A Starship Bridge Simulator With EmptyEpsilon

March 23, 2025 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

Who hasn’t dreamed of serving on the bridge of a Star Trek starship? Although the EmptyEpsilon project isn’t adorned with the Universe-famous LCARS user interface, it does provide a comprehensive simulation scenario, in a multiplayer setting. Designed as a LAN or WAN multiplayer game hosted by the server that also serves as the main screen, four to six additional devices are required to handle the non-captain tasks. These include helm, weapons, engineering, science and relay, which includes comms.

Scenarios are created by the game master, not unlike a D&D game, with the site providing a reference and various examples of how to go about this.

The free and open source game’s binaries can be obtained directly from the site, but it’s also available on Steam. The game isn’t limited to just Trek either, but scenarios can be crafted to fit whatever franchise or creative impulse feels right for that LAN party.

Obviously building the whole thing into a realistic starship bridge is optional, but it certainly looks like more fun that way.

Building A Handheld Pong Game

March 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Pong was one of the first video games to really enter the public consciousness. While it hasn’t had the staying power of franchises like Zelda or Call of Duty, it nonetheless still resonates with gamers today. That includes [Arnov Sharma], who put together this neat handheld version using modern components.

An ESP32 development board serves as the brains of the operation. Capable of operating at many hundreds of megahertz, it has an excessive amount of power for an application as simple as this. Nonetheless, it’s cheap, and it gets the job done. It’s paired with an SSD1306 OLED screen of 124 x 32 resolution. That might not sound like much, but it’s plenty when you’re just drawing two paddles and a ball bouncing between them. Control is via a pair of SMD push buttons for a nice responsive feel.

What’s really neat, though, is the presentation. [Arnov] wrapped the electronics in a neat bean-shaped housing that vaguely apes game controllers of the 16-bit era. Indeed, [Arnov] explains that it was inspired by the Sega Genesis specifically. It looks great with the black PCBs integrated so nicely with the bright orange 3D printed components, and looks quite comfortable to use, too.

It might be a simple project, but it’s done rather well. Just by thinking about color choices and how to assemble the base components, [Arnov] was able to create an attractive and functional game that’s a lot more eye catching than some random boards thrown in an old project box. Indeed, we’ve featured stories on advanced FR4/PCB construction techniques before, too. Meanwhile, if you’re creating your own projects with similar techniques, don’t hesitate to let us know!

This M5Stack Game Is Surprisingly Addictive

March 19, 2025 by Jenny List 4 Comments

For those of us lucky enough to have been at Hackaday Europe in Berlin, there was a feast of hacks at our disposal. Among them was [Vladimir Divic]’s gradients game, software for an M5Stack module which was definitely a lot of fun to play. The idea of the game is simple enough, a procedurally generated contour map is displayed on the screen, and the player must navigate a red ball around and collect as many green ones as possible. It’s navigated using the M5Stack’s accelerometer, which is what makes for the engaging gameplay. In particular it takes a moment to discover that the ball can be given momentum, making it something more than a simple case of ball-rolling.

Underneath the hood it’s an Arduino .ino file for the M5Stack’s ESP32, and thus shouldn’t present a particular challenge to most readers. Meanwhile the M5Stack with its versatile range of peripherals has made it onto these pages several times over the years, not least as a LoRA gateway.

Run Xbox 360 Games On Your PC With XenonRecomp

March 7, 2025 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Inspired by the N64: Recompiled project, XenonRecomp does something similar, except for the PowerPC-equipped Microsoft Xbox 360 game console. Based around the triple-core IBM CPU codenamed ‘Xenon‘, the Xbox 360 was released in 2005 and generally quite successful over its lifespan despite its Red Ring of Death issues. Although the current Xbox Series X supports running a number of Xbox 360 games, this is done via emulation and only 632 games out of 2,155 are supported.

This is where XenonRecomp not only promises turning the games into native (x86) software, but also allowing for a range of graphical improvements. Best of all, it allows for Xbox 360 games to be preserved instead of linked to an obsolete console. That said, much like with N64Recomp, it’s not a simple matter of running a tool over the PPC binary. You’re expected to have in-depth systems knowledge, with the tools in XenonRecomp assisting with the decompilation (into C++) and the recompilation into x86 binaries, but support for PPC instructions, VMX (vector instructions) and aspects like jump table conversion and (currently missing) MMIO support are likely to present an enterprising developer with hours of fun to implement and debug when issues arise.

Continue reading “Run Xbox 360 Games On Your PC With XenonRecomp” →

What Game Should Replace Doom As The Meme Port Of Choice?

February 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 113 Comments

DOOM. The first-person shooter was an instant hit upon its mrelease at the end of 1993. It was soon ported off the PC platform to a number of consoles with varying success. Fast forward a few years, and it became a meme. People were porting Doom to everything from thermostats to car stereos and even inside Microsoft Word itself.

The problem is that porting Doom has kind of jumped the shark at this point. Just about every modern microcontroller or piece of consumer electronics these days has enough grunt to run a simple faux-3D game engine from 1993. It’s been done very much to death at this point. The time has come for a new meme port!

Good Game

Doom became a popular meme port for multiple reasons. For one, it’s just complex and resource-intensive enough to present a challenge, without being so demanding as to make ports impractical or impossible. It’s also been open-source for decades, and the engine has been hacked to death. It’s probably one of the best understood game engines out there at this point. On top of that, everybody plays Doom at some point, and it was one of the biggest games of the 90s. Put all that together, and you’ve got the perfect meme port.

However, you can always have too much of a good thing. Just as The Simpsons got old after season 10 and Wonderwall is the worst song you could play at a party, Doom ports have been overdone. But what other options are there? Continue reading “What Game Should Replace Doom As The Meme Port Of Choice?” →

Game Bub Plays ROMs And Cartridges

February 15, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

With today’s technology, emulating video game consoles from the 90s or before is trivial. A Raspberry Pi and a controller of some sort is perhaps the easiest and simplest way to go to get this job done, but to really impress the masses some extra effort is required. This handheld from [Eli] called the Game Bub not only nails the appearance and feel of the first three generations of Nintendo handhelds but, thanks to its FPGA, can play not only ROMs but the original game cartridges as well.

As [Eli] notes, the FPGA is not strictly necessary for emulation, but does seem to be better at interfacing with physical hardware like controllers and game cartridges. For this task an Xilinx XC7A100T with integrated memory was chosen, with a custom PCB supporting the built-in controller, speaker, a rechargeable lithium battery, and a 480×320 display (that had to be rotated out of portrait mode). An SD Card reader is included for any ROM files, and there’s also a ESP32-S3 included to give the handheld WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, with future plans to support the communications protocol used by the Game Boy Advance Wireless Adapter.

There are a few other features with the Game Bub as well, including the ability to use an authentic link cable to communicate with the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color, and a Switch-like dock that allows the Game Bub to be connected to an external monitor. It’s also open source, which makes it an even more impressive build. Presumably it doesn’t include the native ability to dump cartridges to ROM files but you don’t need much more than a link cable to do that if you need to build your ROM library.

Continue reading “Game Bub Plays ROMs And Cartridges” →