Claude Plays DOOM

August 26, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 31 Comments

Large language models (LLMs) are generally thought of as machines that accept textual prompts and spit out textual content. However, if you’re creative in the way you interface with them, you can get them to do a wider range of tasks. For example, [Andrea Ricci] figured out how to get one to play DOOM.

For this project, [Andrea] began by porting the game to the SCINTIX P4. It’s a rather interesting device, being a single board designed in the Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 form factor, but carrying an ESP32-P4 and an ESP32-C6 instead. The game runs on the P4 and is displayed on a 1024×600 MIPI DSI panel, but it’s only stepped through a few frames at a time. These frames are then passed to Claude Sonnet via a WebSockets setup. With only the same information as a human player would get, the LLM has to figure out what it’s looking at, and then respond with movement and fire commands to play the game.

It’s quite interesting to watch the system play—the LLM mostly accurately describes the game world, navigates down corridors, opens doors, and shoots at enemies. There is a bit of work behind the scenes to enable it to see and understand the game world—namely, using a depth fan across the field of view so it can figure out where walls are and how not to bang into them. There’s also an ASCII automap used to allow the system to keep track of where it has already been. But fundamentally, the LLM is playing the game without any other sort of additional assistance.

We’ve seen some other great ways in which AIs have been whipped up to play various games, like Trackmania.

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Using The Basic SNES Hardware To Play Minecraft

August 23, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

After previously putting a very basic version of Minecraft on the Game Boy Color, [Tobi] decided to have some fun and port that version also to the Super Nintendo (SNES), just to see what would happen with its more powerful hardware. Even without using an add-on chip like the Super FX 3D chip that made games like Star Fox and Doom possible with its 3D-rendered geometry, the basic SNES hardware can already provide a serviceable Minecraft experience.

You can download the SFC file here, featuring a starting world in which you can do all the usual Minecraft-ing shenanigans, like world destruction and construction. Unsurprisingly the game’s resolution is much higher than on the GBC, though the brief glimpse [Tobi] shows of Minecraft on the Game Boy Advance (GBA) with its proper 3D-rendering hardware are leaps ahead of what the basic SNES can do.

This of course raises the question of what Minecraft on the SNES could look like once you add the Super FX or similar 3D accelerator chips for the SNES into the mix. Rather than just being limited to sprite-based graphics and transformations, suddenly you can use real polygons.

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Running Zork On The Steam Controller

August 20, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

The Steam Controller is a device capable of many interesting feats. It’s intended to act simply as an input device, and yet, it can run games all on its own. As [Owen Feldman] has demonstrated, by having the Steam Controller play Zork.

[Owen] took quite an interesting route to get the there: he wrote a Rust program to emulate the Intel 8080 CPU and CP/M, as one does. This was ported to the Steam Controller, which emulates the CPU and memory on its own internal processor. I/O is streamed over USB, since the Steam Controller lacks a keyboard or screen. The CP/M disk lives in the controller, but the Zork disk data is streamed over USB as well.

If you’re wondering how [Owen] got all this running on the controller, he explains on his personal website. He used what appears to be an undocumented tool included with Steam that allows flashing firmware on the device. Helpfully, Valve also include the original firmware in the same folder, unsigned and only relying on a simple CRC checksum. [Owen] bricked his controller a couple times experimenting with this tool and loading his own firmware, but all came good in the end.

The Steam Controller is probably the oddest device to run CP/M for a while, but hey—it’s a neat party trick. Not much is going to top the auto-docking hack from a few months ago, though.

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Miniaturizing The Atari 2600 Console

August 20, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

For as popular as Atari was in their heyday, it wasn’t until well after they were on their famous decline that they released their first handheld, the Atari Lynx. In retrospect, competing with the Game Boy was not going to be a recipe for success even without considering their other problems as a company, and as a result was their penultimate console before exiting the market completely. But [Nick]’s most recent project asks what the world would have been like with an Atari handheld from their golden era, and has been working on this miniaturized version of the 2600.

Unlike any modern emulators which can easily handle Atari 2600 games in almost any form factor today, this console is doing it all with as much original hardware as possible. It uses much smaller switches and buttons compared to the original, and omits some other unnecessary hardware for today’s world like the RF modulator. [Nick] has also designed a custom PCB that reduces the overall footprint considerably as well, and has relocated the cartridge port in preparation for its eventual handheld shape. The result is a console using original hardware that’s less than half the footprint of the original.

Although there were around 30 million Atari 2600 consoles sold and the system is unlikely to be a real collector’s item anytime soon, [Nick] makes sure to note that no real 2600 hardware was harmed in this build. And, as far as its handheld nature, this is a stepping stone on the path to that eventual goal. We’ll look forward to an eventual system that integrates a screen and controller as well as a port for the original cartridges. In the meantime, here’s another handheld 2600 that fits completely inside one of those cartridges.

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Large-Scale Pokémon Eviction Looms With Pokémon Bank Server Shutdown

August 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

After the Nintendo 3DS handheld console saw most its online services including the online store (eShop) taken offline not too long ago, it was only a matter of time before the demise of even the remaining paid services, such as the Pokémon Bank which Nintendo has now announced will be shutting down on February 25 of 2027.

The ability to transfer the digital pocket monsters, or Pokémon, between physical systems has been a staple of the series since the early Gameboy days when a link cable would be all you needed to trade and catch’em’all, as they say in the trade. Naturally over time this Cloud-based aspect wormed its way into this series as well, starting with the 3DS and this continuing on the Nintendo Switch in the form of the Pokémon HOME app.

With this paid service an avid Pokémon fan could collect up to 3,000 of these digital critters, move them between various Pokémon games and generally allow players to keep the same Pokémon with them across games. As noted by [Kevdog Plays] in an informative video on what to do before the shutdown, the service is free during these final months.

What’s interesting is that certain Pokémon can only be obtained from 3DS Pokémon games, which means that without either an alternative to this transfer mechanism or these games becoming available on newer Nintendo consoles, there will forever be that gaping hole in one’s Pokedex. Naturally this raises the usual questions about software archiving and preservation when an online service is required for the full game experience.

Uninvasive EEG Interface Could Be Used To Play Games

August 14, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 6 Comments

These days, most of us interface with our computing devices in the same old-fashioned ways—via keyboards, mice, and touchscreens. The idea of a more direct brain-to-machine interface remains appealing to many. [Ildar Rakhmatulin] and [Youssef El Abbass] have been working on just such a device, with an eye to using it for gaming.

The device is referred to as Octopus 16, so named because it combines sixteen EEG electrodes into a single compact package, along with the required common reference and ground. The contacts themselves are pogo pins, assembled into a coin-sized cluster. The device is strapped to the head, pushing the contacts against the scalp, and data from the electrodes is then siphoned off to a host machine via Bluetooth Low Energy. The EEG signals are picked up with a pair of Texas Instruments ADS131M08 ADCs, each with 8 channels, with a resolution of 24-bits to capture fine detail in whatever the brain is doing. An ESP32 microcontroller is responsible for grabbing the ADC output and trucking it out over Bluetooth.

The rig is designed for use with the PiEEG software platform. The team have experimented with the device, showing it off by using the EEG signals to detect an individual’s focus state and using that to feed into simple game environments.

Ultimately, what has been shown so far is not so different from the old Force Trainer toy, but the design might prove useful if you’re looking into doing EEG experiments on a budget. Just do your due diligence to make sure you’re getting more signal than noise out of those lovely 24-bit ADCs. Video after the break.

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Running DOOM On A Cheap 104-in-One Handheld

August 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Taking a break from putting DOOM on devices that absolutely were never conceived for use as gaming devices, [Aaron Christophel] recently got enticed by some cheapo handheld gaming systems at his local Action budget store. One is a controller-shaped ‘mini game console’ with 104 games from the 1980s and 1990s, while the other is simply a Pac-Man handheld in a more typical rectangular form factor. Although this brings to mind basic blob chips and limited hacking potential, as it turns out they’re actually quite nice inside.

As also covered in the demonstration video, rather than said nasty blob chip, both handhelds turned out to use the same unmarked MCU in QFN48 packaging. Some prodding and poking confirmed that it’s a typical ARM core, specifically a Cortex-M33 compatible STAR-MC1 ARMv8-M from an unknown manufacturer. Without a datasheet to go by, its limitations had to be discovered experimentally.

Of those, the biggest were a clock speed of 62 MHz – instead of the typical 194 MHz – as well as a lack of sound. This latter issue might be fixable with a better understanding of what appears to be a quirky DMA-fed DAC. Beyond this you’re also dealing with limited memory and of course just 4 MB of flash, though the chip for this might be upgradable if the MCU can map more. You do get a 320×240 display and a lot of buttons, which is admittedly nice.

As for the price difference of around $8/€7 for the Pac-Man version, this appears to be due to it running an officially licensed Bandai Namco arcade emulator as firmware, while the 104-in-one unit runs FlyThings/ZKSWE with a NES emulator.

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