Commodore’s Most Popular Computer Gets DOOM-style Shooter

November 21, 2025 by Tyler August 46 Comments

When people talk about the lack of a DOOM being the doom Commodore home computers, they aren’t talking about the C64, which was deep into obsolescence when demon-slaying suddenly became the minimal requirement for all computing devices. That didn’t stop [Kamil Wolnikowski] and [Piotr Kózka] from hacking together Grey a ray-cast first-person shooter for the Commodore 64.

Grey bares more than a passing resemblance to id-software’s most-ported project. It apparently runs at 16 frames per second on a vanilla C64 — no super CPU required. The secret to the speedy game play is the engine’s clever use of the system’s color mapping functionality: updating color maps is faster than redrawing the screen. Yeah, that makes for rather “blockier” graphics than DOOM, but this is running on a Commodore 64, not a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. Allowances must be made. Come to think of it, we don’t recall DOOM running this smooth on the minimum required hardware — check out the demo video below and let us know what you think.

The four-level demo currently available is about 175 kB, which certainly seems within the realms of possibility for disk games using the trusty 1541. Of course nowadays we do have easier ways to get games onto our vintage computers.

If you’re thinking about Commodore’s other home computer, it did eventually get a DOOM-clone. Continue reading “Commodore’s Most Popular Computer Gets DOOM-style Shooter” →

Diskette Game Floppy Flopper Is Certainly No Flop

November 20, 2025 by Tyler August 5 Comments

There’s a tactile joy to the humble 3.5″ floppy that no USB stick will ever match. It’s not just the way they thunk into place in a well-made drive, the eject button, too, is a tactile experience not to be missed. If you were a child in disk-drive days, you may have popped a disk in-and-out repeatedly just for the fun of it — and if you weren’t a child, and did it anyway, we’re not going to judge. [igor] has come up with a physical game called “Floppy Flopper” that provides an excuse to do just that en masse, and it looks like lots of fun.

It consists of nine working floppy drives in a 3×3 grid, all mounted on a hefty welded-steel frame. Each drive has an RGB LED above it. The name of the game is to swap floppies as quickly as possible so that the color of the floppy in the drive matches the color flashing above it. Each successful insertion is worth thirteen points, tracked on a lovely matrix display. Each round is faster than the last, until you miss the window or mix up colors in haste. That might make more sense if you watch the demo video below.

Continue reading “Diskette Game Floppy Flopper Is Certainly No Flop” →

Pong Gets The Boot

November 20, 2025 by Al Williams 5 Comments

You might be surprised to find out that [Akshat Joshi’s] Pong game that fits in a 512-byte boot sector isn’t the first of its kind. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an accomplishment to shoehorn useful code in that little bitty space.

As you might expect, a game like this uses assembly language. It also can’t use any libraries or operating system functions because there aren’t any at that particular time of the computer startup sequence. Once you remember that the bootloader has to end with two magic bytes (0x55 0xAA), you know you have to get it all done in 510 bytes or less.

This version of Pong uses 80×25 text mode and writes straight into video memory. You can find the code in a single file on GitHub. In the old days, getting something like this working was painful because you had little choice but reboot your computer to test it and hope it went well. Now you can run it in a virtual machine like QEMU and even use that to debug problems in ways that would have made a developer from the 1990s offer up their life savings.

We’ve seen this before, but we still appreciate the challenge. We wonder if you could write Pong in BootBasic?

FLOSS Weekly Episode 855: Get In The Minecart, Loser!

November 19, 2025 by Jonathan Bennett 2 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Kevin, Colin, and Curtis about Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead! It’s a rogue-like post-apocalyptic survival game that you can play in the terminal, over SSH if you really want to! Part of the story is a Kickstarter that resulted in a graphics tile-set. And then there’s the mods!

Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 855: Get In The Minecart, Loser!” →

A closeup of a transparent-bodied example of the new Steam Frame VR headset

The Engineering Behind Valve’s New VR Headset

November 15, 2025 by Tyler August 16 Comments

Valve’s new Steam Frame is what all the well-connected YouTubers are talking about, but most of them are talking about what it’s like to game on it. That’s great content if you’re into it, but not exactly fodder for Hackaday — with one exception. [Gamers Nexus] gives us a half hour of relatively-unedited footage of them just chatting with the engineers behind the hardware.

It’s great stuff right from the get-go: they start with how thermal management drove the PCB design, and put the SoC on the “back” of the chip, sandwiched betwixt heat pipes. We don’t usually think of taking heat through the PCB when building a board, so it’s a neat detail to learn about before these things get into the hands of the usual suspects who will doubtless give us teardown videos in a few months.

From there wanders to power delivery — getting the voltage regulators packaged properly was a challenge, since impedance requirements meant a very tight layout. Anyone who has worked on this kind of SBC might be familiar with that issue, but for those looking in from the outside, it’s a fascinating glimpse at electrical sausage being made. That’s just the first half.

The heat-regulation conversation is partially repeated the next conversation (which seems to have happened first) where they get into the cooling requirements of the LCD screens. This requires less than you might think, as they like to run warm for fast refresh. It’s really more about keeping your face cool. They also they discuss acoustic vibration — you don’t want your integrated audio shaking your IMUs apart — and why the prototype was being blasted with freakin’ laser beams to monitor it.

If you haven’t seen or read any other coverage on the Steam Frame, you’re going to miss some context here, but if you’ve not hid under a rock for that announcement, this is amazing detail to have. We’re hugely impressed that Valve let their engineers out of their cubicle-cave to talk to media.

Sure, it’s not an open-source VR headset, but compared to the deafening silence coming from the likes of Meta, this level of information is still awesome to have.

Continue reading “The Engineering Behind Valve’s New VR Headset” →

Running A Minecraft Server On A WiFi Light Bulb

November 13, 2025 by Maya Posch 36 Comments

WiFi-enabled ‘smart’ light bulbs are everywhere these days, and each one of them has a microcontroller inside that’s capable enough to run all sorts of interesting software. For example, [vimpo] decided to get one running a minimal Minecraft server.

The Bl602-equipped board inside the LED lightbulb. (Credit: vimpo, YouTube)

Inside the target bulb is a BL602 MCU by Bouffalo Lab, that features not only a radio supporting 2.4 GHz WiFi and BLE 5, but also a single-core RISC-V CPU that runs at 192 MHz and is equipped with 276 kB of RAM and 128 kB flash.

This was plenty of space for the minimalist Minecraft server [vimpo] wrote several years ago. The project says it was designed for “machines with limited resources”, but you’ve still got to wonder if they ever thought it would end up running on a literal lightbulb at some point.

It should be noted, of course, that this is not the full Minecraft server, and it should only be used for smaller games like the demonstrated TNT run mini game.

Perhaps the next challenge will be to combine a large set of these light bulbs into a distributed computing cluster and run a full-fat Minecraft server? It seems like a waste to leave the BL602s and Espressif MCUs that are in these IoT devices condemned to a life of merely turning the lights on or off when we could have them do so much more.

Continue reading “Running A Minecraft Server On A WiFi Light Bulb” →

Resurrecting Conquer: A Game From The 1980s

November 11, 2025 by Al Williams 15 Comments

[Juan] describes himself as a software engineer, a lover of absurd humor, and, among other things, a player of Nethack. We think he should add computer game archaeologist to that list. In the 1990s, he played a game that had first appeared on USENET in 1987. Initially called “Middle-earth multiplayer game,” it was soon rebranded with the catchier moniker, Conquer.

It may not seem like a big thing today, but writing multiplayer software and distributing it widely was pretty rare stuff in the late 1980s or early 1990s. In 2006, [Juan] realized that this game, an intellectual predecessor to so many later games, was in danger of being lost forever. The source code was scattered around different archives, and it wasn’t clear what rights anyone had to the source code.

Continue reading “Resurrecting Conquer: A Game From The 1980s” →