Although the video game crash of the mid-80s caused a major decline in arcades from their peak popularity, the industry didn’t completely die off. In fact, there was a revival that lasted until the 90s with plenty of companies like Capcom, Midway, SEGA, and Konami all competing to get quarters, francs, loonies, yen, and other coins from around the world. During this time, Namco — another game company — built a colossal 28-player prototype shooter game. Eventually, they cut it down to a (still titanic) six-player game that was actually released to the world. [PhilWIP] and his associates are currently restoring one of the few remaining room-sized games that are still surviving.
Back in the olden days, there existed physical game stores, which in addition to physical games would also have kiosks where you could try out the current game consoles and handhelds. Generally these kiosks held the console, a display and any controllers if needed. After a while these kiosks would get scrapped, with only a very few ending up being rescued and restored. One of the lucky ones is a Game Boy kiosk, which [The Retro Future] managed to snag after it was found in a construction site. Sadly the thing was in a very rough condition, with the particle board especially being mostly destroyed.
Display model Game Boy, safely secured into the demo kiosk. (Credit: The Retro Future, YouTube)
These Game Boy kiosks also featured a special Game Boy, which – despite being super rare – also was hunted down. This led to the restoration, which included recovering as much of the original particle board as possible, with a professional furniture restore ([Don]) lending his expertise. This provides a master class in how to patch up damaged particle board, as maligned as this wood-dust-and-glue material is.
The boards were then reassembled more securely than the wood screws used by the person who had found the destroyed kiosk, in a way that allows for easy disassembly if needed. Fortunately most of the plastic pieces were still intact, and the Game Boy grey paint was easily matched. Next was reproducing a missing piece of art work, with fortunately existing versions available as reference. For a few missing metal bits that held the special Game Boy in place another kiosk was used to provide measurements.
After all this, the kiosk was powered back on, and it was like 1990 was back once again, just in time for playing Tetris on a dim, green-and-black screen while hunched half into the kiosk at the game store.
These days even a lowly microcontroller can easily trade blows with – or surpass – desktop systems of yesteryear, so it is little wonder that DIY handheld gaming systems based around an MCU are more capable than ever. A case in point is the GK handheld gaming system by [John Cronin], which uses an MCU from relatively new and very capable STM32H7S7 series, specifically the 225-pin STM32H7S7L8 in TFBGA package with a single Cortex-M7 clocked at 600 MHz and a 2D NeoChrom GPU.
Coupled with this MCU are 128 MB of XSPI (hexa-SPI) SDRAM, a 640×480 color touch screen, gyrometer, WiFi network support and the custom gkOS in the firmware for loading games off an internal SD card. A USB-C port is provided to both access said SD card’s contents and for recharging the internal Li-ion battery.
As can be seen in the demonstration video, it runs a wide variety of games, ranging from DOOM (of course), Quake, as well as Command and Conquer: Red Alert and emulators for many consoles, with the Mednafen project used to emulate Game Boy, Super Nintendo and other systems at 20+ FPS. Although there aren’t a lot of details on how optimized the current firmware is, it seems to be pretty capable already.
A couple of months back, Electronic Arts did something uncharacteristically benevolent and released several of the old Command and Conquer games under the GPLv3. Logically, we knew that opened the doors up to the games being ported to new operating systems and architectures, but we admit that it was still a little surprising to see Command and Conquer: Red Alert running on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2.
[Charlie Birks] documented the process of getting the 1996 game up and running on the microcontroller in a series of Mastodon posts spanning a few days in March. Seeing the incremental progress made each day makes for interesting reading, as he moves from the game just barely starting up to being able to complete missions and eventually even get multiplayer going between two Picos.
As [Charlie] clarifies, he’s technically using the Pimoroni Pico Plus 2 W, which takes the RP2350B from the official Pico 2, adds 8 MB of PSRAM, and bumps the onboard flash to 16 MB. The upgraded specs and an SD card are required to get the game running, as content that would have originally been held in RAM on the computer must instead be pulled from flash.
For an even more streamlined experience, he eventually slaps the Pico Plus 2 W into the Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base — which provided not only an integrated SD card slot, but (as the name implies) VGA output.
It’s still early days, but [Charlie] has been pushing all of his code changes into his fork of Red Alert on GitHub for anyone who wants to play along at home. If you get his fork compiled and running on your own Pico, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Odd hardware designs crop up in art and renders far more frequently than in the flesh, but console modder [GingerOfOz] felt the need to bring [Anh Dang]’s image of the inevitable carcinization of our gaming consoles to life.
Starting with the image as inspiration, [GingerOfOz] got to work in CAD, creating an entirely new shell for the battered PSOne he adopted for the project. The final product is slightly less curvy than the picture, but some artistic license was necessary to go from the page to the real world.
The enclosure itself looks straightforward, if a bit tedious, but the articulating crab controller is a work of art itself. He could’ve made the arms static or non-functional, but they’re a fully-functional PlayStation controller that can move around just like on your favorite crustacean at the beach, minus the pinching. We love this whimsical take on the console mod which is a breath of salty air to the continuous race to get increasingly complex consoles into handheld form, although there’s certainly nothing wrong with that!
[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.
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.
