Games

880 Articles

Porting Video Games To VHS

October 5, 2026 by 13 Comments

Although VHS-based games have existed for about as long as VHS players have sat in millions of living rooms, they always tended to be rather sparse gaming experiences. For example, the ActionMax gaming “console” that [Throaty Mumbo] shows off in his most recent video. You use a zapper to purportedly shoot down on-screen targets in “games” like Sonic Fury. After this disappointing experience, he figured he should probably make his own interpretation of a VHS-based video game.

This involves a DE1-SoC FPGA board along with an RP2350 MCU. There’s also an in-progress GitHub repository for those who wish to follow along. Rather than the simplistic Action Max system that plays exactly the same every time along with a basic light gun feature, this actually allows for interactive gameplay.

The video shows that the VHS tape contains both binary data for the game, as well as a number of video streams. This is decoded using the DE1’s composite input, with the RP2350 then acting on the decoded game data and handling input from the controller. With this, interesting effects can be accomplished, such as background video streams for the original Super Mario Bros.

Other demos include Night Trap and a variant of Doom that uses prerecorded video segments along with action events requiring you to press a specific button. Since there’s actual bytecode involved, quite a few more options are available for game development that could have been interesting to a 1980s audience.

It is hard to imagine how hard it was to get the VCR into homes, only for it to vanish again.

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Motion Control Via Belt

October 4, 2026 by 3 Comments

[Tolko] wanted to encourage kids to have some physical activity, but noted that they only wanted to play games. That led to BlobJump, a Raspberry Pi-based game sort of like the famous dinosaur runner game. The difference? Your body — or more precisely, a belt worn on your body — is the controller. Your jumping and ducking make your on-screen avatar do the same thing. Watch the video below to see the game in action.

Each belt contains an ESP32-C3, an MPU-6050, and enough rechargeable battery to make it all work. Everything is wireless, of course. We didn’t see any video of the actual kids, so we don’t know how active they were or whether they figured out they could just have a seat and move the belts in their hands. Even so, it looks like a fun game.

We couldn’t help but think that, beyond encouraging activity, this might be a great project to get a kid excited about building hardware and software. You could certainly do worse in that department.

This isn’t a totally new idea, but we liked the execution. If you are truly lazy, you can skip playing the game completely.

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Play PlayStation 2 And XBox 1 Games On Your Jailbroken PS5

October 3, 2026 by 4 Comments

Whereas PlayStation 3 and earlier were rather specialized consoles, today’s consoles like the PlayStation 5 are essentially x86-based gaming PCs in a fancy case, with custom firmware to lock it all down. Once you’re past those gates, however, you can use it to run pretty much anything. Naturally, this also means porting PlayStation 2 and Xbox 1 emulators to the PS5, in the form of the PS5X2 and XPSemu projects respectively.

In addition, Videocardz reports that Wine is being ported to the PS5 as its Proton iteration popularized by Valve’s SteamOS. This ‘PP’ project — for PS5 Proton — has no public releases yet, but it could mean that playing Windows games on your PS5 could also become reality.

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DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Discs

September 30, 2026 by 14 Comments

Optical media may be dead for video games on the big corporate consoles, but not in [Emmet]’s heart– or on his DIY game console, that he built specifically to use optical media. Not fancy blu-ray or newfangled DVDs, either, but good old fashioned CDs from the Orange Book.

Yeah, he’s not fitting modern AAA flagship games on those disks, but the Intel N150 on the single board computer he’s using isn’t going to power through them, either. That’s fine, though, because there are literally decades of content this machine can handle. That’s why the board is running Batocera, which is a Linux distro tailor-made for retrogaming on x86– and also ARM, but that’s not important here.

He’s using ESP32-S3s to run custom wireless gamepads with BLE, which means he’s got more power in each of them than some of the retro consoles this machine is emulating, but it gets the job done. Unlike some cartridge projects we’ve seen that merely queue up the games, the CDs on this one actually do seem to store the ROM file, along with a shell script to put it in the correct emulator’s library. We might have gone with autorun, but it’s [Emmet]’s console and he’s got it working how he likes.

What really makes this project stand out, in our opinion, is the effort [Emmet] put into custom CD labels and art for the jewel cases. It really makes this feel like an actual game console and not just a PC hooked to a the TV. The 3D printed case doesn’t hurt in that respect, either.

Be it from a nostalgia, as in this project, a need for cheap storage, or the perverse desire to hook it to an NES, optical media seems to be having a bit of a moment. Speaking of moment, we’re going to have to take a moment to come to grips with the fact that CDs have become nostalgic. Didn’t they just replace vinyl?

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The many polygons of Solid Snake on an ESP-driven LCD

Metal Gear Solid Moves From PlayStation To ESP32

September 29, 2026 by 5 Comments

If you haven’t heard of Metal Gear, you probably haven’t played video games these last few decades. The original Metal Gear dates back to 1987 and launched on the MSX, but the real rise to fame probably started with Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation in 1998. What needed a hefty console in 1998 can comfortably fit on a microcontroller in 2026, though, as [David Montero Crespo] demonstrates with his port of MGS to the ESP32-S3.

[David] is — as we always are — standing on the shoulders of giants with this hack. Most specifically, the project relies entirely on the [FoxdieTeam] MGS Reversing decompliation project. Of course what one team decompiles, another can recompile, and in this case [David] chose to recompile the game for Expressif’s exceptional ESP32. It wasn’t quite as easy as just forking the repo and compiling with the ESP32 as a target though, as the blog post explains.

We won’t spoil it, but [David] did have to make some changes to account for the different quirks the MIPS processor in the PlayStation has compared to the Xtensa cores on the microcontroller. Then to make it playable, he put the ESP32-S3 module onto some perfboard with an analog stick from a drone controller, an ILI9341 LCD panel, and a resistor ladder to run the buttons for a barebones handheld.

Fans of MSG and its many sequels may appreciate this replica of the codex communicator. Fans of the ESP32 may remember the Wipeout clone we featured earlier, which already proved the popular microcontroller could handle PlayStation-level graphics. If you were hoping for actual solid metal gears, you can cut your own at home.

a beauty shot of the 3D-printed version

This PICO-8 Handheld Is No Fantasy

September 28, 2026 by 7 Comments

The PICO-8 is what is known as a ‘fantasy console’– you can program it, and there are oodles of games, but it’s not actually the 8-bit console it pretends to be. It’s a virtual machine, one that can run on top of any modern OS. When [UncleStem] got into PICO-8, he decided that he liked the PICO-8’s portability, he wanted a different kind of portability– so he took the ‘fantasy’ out of ‘fantasy console’ with his GameBoy-esqe handheld build, the build/dev video of which is embedded below.

At its core, it’s a Raspberry Pi Zero2W. That’s rather overkill for an 8-bit virtual machine, but it’s what he had on hand, and it makes for an easy build. The real hero of the build is the 720 by 720 pixel IPS display that matches the PICO-8’s square aspect ratio and takes up most of the real estate on the handheld. Even better, it has HDMI in and sound support, so with some buttons and a battery the hardware is all there after [UncleStem] designs a handsome 3D printed case, and also has a go milling it out of aluminum before giving up and having a pro do it.

Since it’s so easy to do these days, everything lives on a custom PCB from his sponsor that gives the handheld good mechanical stability. He’s also using the full-colour silkscreen option to make a very pretty PCB. If that part of the project appeals, we’ve covered guides to PCB art before. He’s shared the PCB and everything else he can on a google drive, though note that the fantasy console itself is not open source, and would need purchased to finish the project.

Oddly enough, this is not the first handheld we’ve seen based on the PICO-8. That would be this project that uses a single-button camcorder form-factor. As unique as that is, this project has the benefit of working with the whole library of PICO-8 games.

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Using The SNES Super FX Chip To Run Super Mario 64

September 28, 2026 by 9 Comments

Although the Nintendo 64 was the first to bring real 3D graphics to the table in 1996, the Super Nintendo had an ace up its sleeve in the form of the Super FX chip. One major advantage of using cartridge-based games is that you have the option to add wild features such as a 3D graphics chip to your SNES, something that got used to make games like Star Fox, and as [Tobi] demonstrates in a recent video, can also totally run Super Mario 64 if you squint a lot.

While there’s a rumor that Nintendo was looking to release a ‘Super Mario FX’ game for the SNES, there’s no evidence for such a project. Fortunately these days we got hobbyists prepared to give it a shake to see what a determined group of SNES game developers could have accomplished back then.

The pleasant surprise here is that although a new engine was needed, the SM64 assets could be used with this ‘SMFX’ game and it runs fairly well. There is still room for performance improvement, and the 2 MB memory limit is a problem that may require some culling of parts of levels.

Frames are painted back to front since there’s no advanced Z-culling or similar features, but it shows just how capable the Super FX chip is. [Tobi] has said that he’ll look at releasing the project in some form once he’s happy with how it works and runs, which is definitely something that we’ll look forward to.

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