Games

703 Articles

Casting Custom Resin Buttons For The Steam Deck

January 26, 2023 by 11 Comments

If you play games on multiple consoles, you’re probably familiar with the occasional bout of uncertainty that comes with each system’s unique button arrangement. They’re all more or less in the same physical location, but each system calls them something different. Depending on who’s controller you’re holding, the same button could be X, A, or B. We won’t even get started on colors.

Overhearing her partner wish the buttons on his Steam Deck matched the color scheme of the Xbox, [Gina Häußge] (of OctoPrint fame) decided to secretly create a set of bespoke buttons for the portable system. There was only one problem…she had no experience with the silicone molding process or epoxy resins which would be required for such an operation.

Toothpicks were used to make channels in the mold.

Luckily we have the Internet, and after researching similar projects that focused on other consoles, [Gina] felt confident enough to take apart Steam’s handheld and extract the original plastic buttons. These went into a clever 3D printed mold box, which was small enough to put into a food vacuum container for degassing purposes. The shape of the buttons necessitated a two-piece mold, into which [Gina] embedded two channels: one to inject the resin, and another that would let air escape.

The red, green, blue, and yellow resins were then loaded into four separate syringes and forced into the mold. It’s critically important to get the orientation right here, as each button has a slightly different shape. It sounds like [Gina] might have mixed up which color each button was supposed to be during an earlier attempt, so for the final run she made a little diagram to keep track. After 24 hours she was able to peel the mold apart and get a look at the perfectly-formed buttons, but it took 72 hours before they were really cured enough to move on to the next step.

[Gina] applied the legends with a sheet of rub-on lettering, which we imagine must have been quite tricky to get lined up perfectly. Since the letters would get worn off after a few intense gaming sessions without protection, she finally sealed the surface of each button by brushing on a thin layer of UV resin and curing it with a flashlight of the appropriate wavelength.

There are a fair number of steps involved, and a fair bit of up-front cost to get all the materials together, but there’s no denying the final result looks phenomenal. Especially for a first attempt. We wouldn’t be surprised if the next time somebody wants to head down this particular path, it’s [Gina]’s post that guides them on their way.

Inside The Atari 2600

January 15, 2023 by 17 Comments

The Atari 2600 was an extremely popular yet very simple game console back in the 1970s. They sold, apparently, over 30 million of them, and, of course, these things broke. We’d get calls from friends and — remember, back then normal people weren’t computer savvy — nine times out of ten, we’d ask them to swap the controllers to show them it was a bad controller, and problem solved. But if you did have to open one up, it was surprising how little there was inside, as [Steve] notes in his recent teardown.

The bulk of the circuit board was switches, the power supply, and a TV modulator if you remember those. The circuit board was a tiny thing with a shrunk-down 6502, a 6532 RIOT chip, and a custom chip called a TIA. If you are familiar with those chips, you might wonder if the TIA had any memory in it. It didn’t. Nearly all the ROM and RAM for the game lived in the cartridge itself. Sure, the RIOT has 128 bytes of memory, but that’s not much.

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Wizards Slay The Dragon That Lays The Golden Egg

January 11, 2023 by 77 Comments

Hail, and well met adventurers! There’s rumors of dark dealings, and mysterious machinations from that group of Western mystics, Wizards of the Coast (WotC). If this pernicious plot is allowed to succeed, a wave of darkness will spread over this land of Open Source gaming, the vile legal fog sticking to and tainting everything it touches. Our quest today is to determine the truth of these words, and determine a defense for the world of open gaming, and indeed perhaps the entire free world! Beware, the following adventure will delve into the bleak magic of licensing, contract law, and litigation.

Ah, Dungeons and Dragons. The original creation of Gary Gygax, refined by countless others, this table-top role-playing game has brought entertainment and much more to millions of players for years. In 2000, WotC made a decision that opened the mechanics of that universe to everyone. The 3rd Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released under the Open Gaming License, a very intentional port of Open Source licensing to table-top gaming — obviously inspired by the GNU Public License. Ryan Dancey was one of the drivers behind the new approach, and made this statement about it:

I think there’s a very, very strong business case that can be made for the idea of embracing the ideas at the heart of the Open Source movement and finding a place for them in gaming. […] One of my fundamental arguments is that by pursuing the Open Gaming concept, Wizards can establish a clear policy on what it will, and will not allow people to do with its copyrighted materials. Just that alone should spur a huge surge in independent content creation that will feed into the D&D network.

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Roll-On Deodorant Controller Heats Up Racing Game

January 10, 2023 by 24 Comments

What do you get when you combine roll-on deodorant containers and a soccer ball with an optical mouse and an obscure 90s Japanese video game about racing armadillos? Well, you get a pretty darn cool controller with which to play said game, we must admit.

We hardly knew they were still making roll-on deodorant, and [Tom Tilley] is out here with three empties with which to hack. And hack he does — after thoroughly washing and drying the containers three, he sawed off the ball-holding bit just below the business part and fit each into the roll-on’s lid. Then [Tom] constructed a semi-elaborate cardboard-and-hot-glue thing to hold them in an equilateral triangle formation. Out of nowhere, he casually drops a fourth modified roll-on ball over an optical mouse, thereby extending the power of lasers to the nifty frosted orb.

Finally, [Tom] placed the pièce de résistance — the soccer ball — on top of everything. The mouse picks up the movement through the middle roll-on, and the original three are there for stability and roll-ability purposes. At last, Armadillo Racing can be played in DIY style. Don’t get it? Don’t sweat it — just check out the brief build video after the break.

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Tetris Joins Minecraft And DOOM In Running A Computer

January 10, 2023 by 6 Comments

There is a select group of computer games whose in-game logic is enough for them to simulate computers in themselves. We’ve seen it in Minecraft and DOOM, and now there’s a new player in town from a surprising quarter: Tetris.

One might wonder how the Russian falling-blocks game could do this, as unlike the previous examples it has a very small playing field. And indeed it’s not quite the Tetris you’re used to playing, but a version played over an infinite board. Then viewed as a continuous progression of the game it can be viewed as somewhat similar to the tape in a Turing machine.

The various moves and outcomes are referred to through a Tetris scripting language, so states can be represented by different sets of blocks and holes while logic elements can be be built up using the various shapes and the game logic. From those a computer can be built, represented entirely in Tetris moves and shapes. It’s a little mind-bending and we’d be lying if we said we understood every nuance of it, but seemingly it works well enough to run the game from within itself.. If it had the catchy music from the NES version, we’d declare it perfect.

Hungry for more? Here’s DOOM doing some adding, and of course Minecraft has a rich computing history.

Is It A Game? Or A Calculator?

January 6, 2023 by 27 Comments

If you are a certain age, you probably remember the Mattel Football game. No LCD screen or fancy cartridges. Just some LEDs and a way to play football when you should be in class. While these might seem primitive to today’s kids, they were marvels of technology in the 1970s when they came out. [Sean Riddle] looks, well, not exactly at the games, but more like in them. As it turns out, they used chips derived from those made for calculators.

[Sean’s] post is a glimpse into this world of over four decades past. Football was actually the second electronic game from Mattel. The first one was Auto Race. There were also games called Space Alert, Baseball, and Gravity. Inside each are quad in-line packages with 42 pins, a Rockwell logo, and a custom part number.

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Logic Gate Game Is Fun AND Educational

December 30, 2022 by 1 Comment

How well do you know your logic gates? For their final submission for STEM Projects class, [BKriet] gamified the situation using a Raspberry Pi Pico, some blinkenlights, and a not-insignificant amount of 3D printing. The result is Name! That! Gate!, a fun and educational toy that [BKriet] ultimately donated back to the class (that’s a hot move in our book).

The objective of this game is to figure out which logic gate is being used to make the output shown on the screen, given A, B, and/or C as inputs. There are ten stages to the game, and each correct stage awards the player 14 points, for a perfect score of 140. Although a random gate is loaded for every stage, code ensures that no gate is ever repeated during a single game.

This project is completely open source, so the gate is wide open. Don’t have a 3D printer? Here’s a big set of PCB logic gates, but really, you can make logic gates out of almost anything.