Games

790 Articles

How Pizza Tycoon Simulates Traffic On A 25 MHz CPU

April 27, 2026 by 18 Comments

Although the game Pizza Tycoon – known as Pizza Connection in Europe – probably doesn’t ring a bell for many folk, this 1994 DOS title is special enough for [cowomaly] to write an open source engine to bring it into the modern age as Pizza Legacy. Along the way, some questions popped up, such as how to animate the little cars that you see driving around in the simulated city and how the heck this was done back in the day on a 25 MHz 386 CPU.

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Reviving Nintendo’s Early Arcade Game, Wild Gunman

April 24, 2026 by 13 Comments

There’s retrogaming, and then there’s retro gaming. This next project falls into the second category, as [Callan] of 74XX Arcade Repair digs into the original Wild Gunman, first released by Nintendo way, way back in 1974 — on 16 mm film. Yes, it was a film-based arcade machine, but how else were you going to get realistic graphics just two years after PONG?

The game had two 16 mm projectors, with four different sets of film reels available, each depicting five gunmen. Unfortunately for [Callan], the film is all he has, so he’s not so much repairing as re-creating the historic game. Luckily, he had the manuals, so at least he knew how it was supposed to come together.

One projector did most of the work, showing the gunmen and a hidden timing signal for the game to know when the user could shoot; the other only activated if the user pulled the trigger at the correct time. Interestingly the ‘gun’ has an IR illuminator that bounced infrared light off the screen to a detector in the cabinet — much like later TV remotes. That makes for a rather large circular hitbox around the enemy gunslinger, which is perhaps not a bad thing for a game likely to be found in a bar.

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How One Line Of TF2 Code Ruined This Simple Feature

April 18, 2026 by 11 Comments

Ever encountered a minor annoying bug in a video game? How about one dating back to 2018? Usually, you have no hope of fixing it, but this time is different. [Joey Cheerio] shows the first-time programmer approach to (with great difficulty) fixing a bouncy ball prop turning invisible when shot in Team Fortress 2.

It starts with a band-aid solution that hides the problem: just turn off jiggle physics! While that works, it also affects many other models in the game, and doesn’t tackle the root cause. Time to investigate. Because this ball often goes overlooked, [Joey Cheerio] didn’t even realize that it was supposed to have jiggle physics, accidentally removing it. Turns out, after scouring the internet for old footage, it’s supposed to jiggle after all.

Back to square one, [Joey Cheerio] infers that the jiggle bone accidentally removed was related to the problem, eventually figuring out that the specific type of jiggle bone used (is_boing) caused the issue. Time to dig in the code. Tracking down the problem is no small feat for someone who’s never programmed before, even with the help of LLMs, but eventually, at 4 in the morning, a breakthrough! The ball no longer turned invisible but retained the intended jiggle.

At the limits of his knowledge on the subject, [Joey Cheerio] posts his partial progress so far to GitHub, where [ficool2] tracks down the real problem and turns this second band-aid into a proper fix. [Joey Cheerio] finishes up by explaining the math of what exactly went wrong.

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Three-Monitor Ridge Racer Machine Emulated In MAME

April 18, 2026 by 12 Comments

When Ridge Racer hit the arcades in the early 1990s, it came in a few different versions. The last variant used three large CRTs to create a wraparound display for the player. Incredibly rare, it’s believed that only a single-digit number of machines remain in existence. [beaumotplage] has secured a remaining example, and been working to preserve this historical artifact.

The first mission when it comes to this machine was to dump the ROMs, which have thus far not been preserved in any major archive. With that done, [beaumotplage] worked to hack a version of MAME that could emulate the Three Monitor Version’s unique mode of operation. As it turns out, each screen is driven by its own arcade board, with the three boards linked via C139 serial links. To emulate this, the trick was simply to write some C139 linkup code and run three versions of MAME all at once, letting them communicate with each other as the original boards would have. It’s a little janky in operation right now, but it does work!

You can download the hacked version of MAME for three-monitor operation here, though note that this does not include the ROM dumps from the machine itself. We look forward to seeing if the hardware ends up getting a full restoration back to operational standard, too.

Overall, this work goes to show that arcade preservation and archival work sometimes requires getting deep into the nitty-gritty technical stuff.

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What Can You Run On A 1960s Univac? Anything You’re Willing To Wait For!

April 18, 2026 by 14 Comments

There are two UNIVAC 1219B computers that have survived since the 1960s and one of them is even operational. [Nathan Farlow] wanted to run a Minecraft server on it, so he did. After a lot of work, of course, which is described in a detailed blog post, and, a YouTube video by [TheScienceElf] we’ve embedded below.

The UNIVAC is a seriously weird architecture by modern standards: it’s got eighteen-bit words — yeah, not even a power of two — and one’s compliment arithmatic with a weird signed zero thing going on. There’s one 36-bit and one 18-bit register, and only 40,960 words of memory. Eighteen-bit words. Yeah, it was the 1960s and they were making it up as they went along.

[Nathan] wasn’t, entirely, as this weird system is both well-documented and already had an emulator — in BASIC, of all things. [TheScienceElf] used the docs and the existing emulator to recreate his own in Rust so he could test their somewhat crazy plan without wasting cycles on real hardware. The plan? Well, there are really only two options if you want to build modern software for a niche architecture: one is to add niche support to something like GCC, and the other is to write a RISC V emulator and compile to that. We’ve seen that second one before, and that’s the route [Nathan] took.

Of course, [Nathan] is a machine learning guy, so he made the best possible use of LLMs — though it’s interesting to see that unlike Z80 Assembly, Claude Code really couldn’t wrap its virtual head around the UNIVAC’s assembly language, and [Nathan] had to bang out the RISC V emulator himself. Emulator in hand, [Nathan] and friends had code to run on the museum UNIVAC. A single frame of an NES game took 40 minutes, but hey, at least it finished before they got back from lunch.

[TheScienceElf]’s YouTube treatment teases hosting Minecraft, but it wasn’t a full server, just the login portion. That they were able to get TCP/IP over serial and set up a handshake between a 2020s laptop and a 1960s computer is still mighty impressive. Just the work the Vintage Computer Federation put in to get and keep this antique running is mighty impressive all on its own, but it’s wonderful they let people play with it.

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Game Cube Hot Tub Animation Brought Into Real World

April 17, 2026 by 2 Comments

Unlike the current era where most consumer electronics are black rectangles, or the early 90s where most consumer electronics were black rectangles, we got a brief glimmer of color, light, and hope in the 2000s. Cell phones had all kinds of shapes and sizes, laptops came in bright colors, and even video game consoles got in on the fun. The Nintendo GameCube not only featured its namesake shape but came in several vibrant colors, most famously a bright purple. In fact, its design was such a hit that it continues to inspire artists and console modders alike. An animator named [kidd.gorgeous] recently envisioned a GameCube as a hot tub, and [BigRig Creates] set out to make this animation a reality.

Of course, this won’t be a life-sized hot tub capable of holding a human, but [BigRig Creates] did want it to be a usable, playable Game Cube with all of the features from the animation present in the final version. Since the lid won’t be operational with a hot tub model on the top lest all of the water spill out every time a game is changed, he’s modified it with some modern tools to hold his games inside the console itself. With the case open he’s also added the LED accent lighting featured in the animation as well as added the 3D-printed hot tub to the top. The hot tub is filled with mineral oil for electronics safety, and has a small pump built in to give the appearance of a working hot tub.

The buttons around the outside are functional as well, toggling the various lighting features and hot tub operation. And of course, the console diorama is fully playable, with the staircase railing able to easily detach in order to access the leftmost controller ports. It’s a faithful adaptation of the original animation, and [BigRig Creates] has a few games on queue that are properly themed for the new hot tub addition like Wave Race 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Pool Paradise.

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DOOM On A Fancy Smart Toaster

April 15, 2026 by 13 Comments

Although toasters should be among the most boring appliances in a household – with perhaps just a focus on making their toasting more deterministic rather than somewhere between ‘still frozen’ and ‘charcoal’ – somehow companies keep churning out toasters that just add very confusing ‘smart’ features. Of course, if a toaster adds a big touch screen and significant processing power, you may as well run DOOM on it, as was [Aaron Christophel]’s reflexive response.

While unboxing the Aeco Toastlab Elite toaster, [Aaron] is positively dumbfounded that they didn’t also add WiFi to the thing. Although on the bright side, that should mean no firmware updates being pushed via the internet. During the disassembly it can be seen that there’s an unpopulated pad for a WiFi chip and an antenna connection, making it clear that the PCB is a general purpose PCB that will see use in other appliances.

The SoC is marked up as a K660L with an external flash chip. Dumping the firmware is very easy, with highly accessible UART that spits out a ‘Welcome to ArtInChip Luban-Lite’ message. After some reverse-engineering the SoC turned out to be a rebranded RISC-V-based ArtInChip D133CxS, with a very usable SDK by the manufacturer. From there it was easy enough to get DOOM to run, with the bonus feature of needing to complete a level before the toaster will give the slice back.

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