Self-Hosted Gaming With Friends

December 26, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 27 Comments

One of the best parts of gaming is gaming with friends, but often this requires everyone involved to have the same expensive piece of hardware. Almost everyone has a computer with a browser already, though, so if you’d like to play online with friends who don’t have the same gaming machine as you, they can play along now simply by opening a web browser thanks to this project called Qwantify.

There are a few requirements to get this to work, though. At least one person needs to have a computer with a GPU to run the docker container that hosts the game, but once that’s done anyone with a browser can connect to it and play. The entire project is open source as well, and since it’s currently a very young project there is only support for AMD and Intel GPUs but it does have a fairly intuitive user interface as well as some other features like allowing for various gaming peripherals and supporting streaming gameplay to Twitch and YouTube.

Being able to host your own gaming server is pretty common in some games like Minecraft, but we are excited to see something that is self-hosted take this idea to the next level. We haven’t seen something this ambitious since we were all talking about cloud gaming, but at least this time the games can be hosted on our own hardware.

Not Can It Run DOOM, But Can DOOM Run It?

December 25, 2022 by Jenny List 15 Comments

It’s the standard test for a hardware hack, half serious half in jest, “Can it run DOOM?”. The iconic early-90s shooter from id software has made an appearance on everything from toothbrushes to LEGO bricks, but nobody has yet posed the opposite question: Can DOOM run it?“. It’s one answered by [Danny Spencer], who has proved that it’s possible to perform computational tasks in the game by producing a working adding machine in a DOOM level.

If you’re familiar with the folks who build working computers within Minecraft, this is in a similar vein. Game elements are used to create logic elements, and from there more complex systems can be assembled. DOOM doesn’t have the in-game logic that Minecraft has, but by clever combination of monster behaviour with in-game actions involving rooms, buttons, and doors, it’s possible to create the simplest of building blocks, the NAND gate.

The video below the break shows the adder in action, first in operation (we like the monster-driven display!), and then a tour of the logic area with its rooms full of computational monsters. It’s important to note that this isn’t a computer, he hasn’t proved it as Turing complete, and that the maximum size of a DOOM level whatever it is will impose an upper limit on what can be done. But it does show that in theory at least a computer can be made in DOOM, and we’re sure people will continue this work.

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Arduboy Mini Is A Fresh Take On An 8-bit Favorite

December 22, 2022 by Tom Nardi 8 Comments

We’ve always been big fans of the Arduboy here at Hackaday. When creator Kevin Bates showed us the original prototype back in 2014, the idea was to use his unique method of mounting components inside routed holes in the PCB to produce an electronic business card that was just 1.6 mm thick. But the Internet quickly took notice of the demos he posted online, and what started as a one-off project led to a wildly successful Kickstarter for a sleek handheld gaming system that used modern components and manufacturing techniques to pay homage to the 8-bit retro systems that came before it.

It’s the sort of hacker success story that we live for around here, but it didn’t end there. After the Kickstarter, the Arduboy community continued to grow, thanks in no small part to Kevin never forgetting the open source principles the product was built on.

He took an active role in the growing community, and when some Arduboy owners started tinkering with adding external storage to their systems so they could hold hundreds of games at a time, he didn’t chastise them for exploring. Instead, he collaborated with them to produce not only a fantastic add-on modification for the original Arduboy, but a new version of the Arduboy that had the community-inspired modifications built in.

Now Kevin is back with the Arduboy Mini, which not only retains everything that made the original a success, but offers some exciting new possibilities. There’s little doubt that he’s got another success on his hands as well as the community’s backing — at the time of this writing, the Kickstarter campaign for the $29 USD Mini has nearly quadrupled its funding goal.

But even still, Kevin offered us a chance to go hands-on with a prototype of the Arduboy Mini so that anyone on the fence can get a third party’s view on the new system. So without further ado, let’s take a look at how this micro machine stacks up to its full-sized counterparts.

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Alpakka: A Creative Commons Game Controller

December 22, 2022 by Dave Rowntree 21 Comments

Input Labs’ mission is to produce ~~open-source~~ Creative Commons hardware and software for creating gaming controllers that can be adapted to anyone. Alpakka is their current take on a generic controller, looking similar to a modern Xbox or PlayStation controller but with quite a few differences. The 3D printed casing has a low-poly count, angular feel to it, but if you don’t like that you can tweak that in blender to just how you want it. Alpakka emulates a standard USB-attached keyboard, mouse, and Xinput gamepad in parallel so should just work out of the box for both Linux and Windows PC platforms. The firmware includes some built-in game profiles, which can be selected on the controller.

No special parts here, just 3D prints, a PCB and some nuts and bolts

The dual D-pads, augmented with an analog stick, is not an unusual arrangement, but what is a bit special is the inventive dual-gyro sensor arrangement –which when used in conjunction with a touch-sensitive pad — emulates a mouse input. Rest your thumb on the right-hand directional pad and the mouse moves, or else it stays fixed, kind of like lifting a mouse off the pad to re-center it.

The wired-only controller is based around a Raspberry Pi Pico, which has plenty of resources for this type of application giving a fast 250 Hz update rate. But to handle no fewer than nineteen button inputs, as well as a scroll wheel, directional switch, and that analog stick, the Pico doesn’t have enough I/O, needing a pair of NXP PCAL6416A I2C IO expanders to deal with it.

The PCB design is done with KiCAD, using a simple 3D printed stand to hold the PCB flat and the through-hole components in place while soldering. Other than a few QFN packages which might be a problem for some people, there is nothing tricky about hand-soldering this design.

We’ve been seeing custom game controllers as long as we’ve been hacking, here’s an interesting take on the mouse-integration theme. If you’re comfortable rolling the hardware side of things, but the firmware is a sticking point, then perhaps look no further than this neat RP2040 firmware project.

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A huge cardboard computer with an equally huge mouse

Massive Mouse Game Mimics Classic Software Crashes

December 14, 2022 by Robin Kearey 6 Comments

Computer mice come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, but are typically designed to fit in the palm of your hand. While some users with large hands may find standard mice uncomfortably small, we don’t think anyone will ever make that complaint about the humongous peripheral [Felix Fisgus] made for a game called Office Job at the ENIAROF art festival in Marseille. With a length of about two meters we suspect it might be the largest functional computer mouse in existence.

Inside the massive mouse is a wooden pallet with four caster wheels that enable smooth movement in all directions. This motion is detected by an ordinary optical mouse sensor: perhaps surprisingly, these can be used at this enormous scale simply by placing a different lens in front.

As for the mouse button, [Felix] and his colleagues found of that the bottom of an empty five-liter can has a nice “pop” to it and installed one in the front section of the device, hooked up to an ESP32 board that communicates with a computer through Bluetooth.

The mouse connects to an equally huge desktop computer, powered by a Raspberry Pi, on which users play a game that involves clicking on error messages from a wide variety of old and new operating systems. Moving the mouse and pressing its button to hit those dialog boxes is a two-person job, and turns the annoyance of software errors into a competitive game.

Optical mouse sensors are versatile devices: apart from their obvious purpose they can also serve as motion sensors for autonomous vehicles, or even as low-resolution cameras.

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Resurrecting PONG, One Jumper Wire At A Time

December 14, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 18 Comments

Between 1976 and 1978, over one million Coleco Telstar video game consoles were sold. The Killer App that made them so desirable? PONG. Yep, those two paddles bouncing a ball around a blocky tennis court were all the rage and helped usher in a new era. And as [Dave] of Dave’s Garage shows us in the video below the break, the bringing the old console back to life proved simpler than expected!

Thankfully, the console is built around what [Dave] quite aptly calls “PONG on a chip”, the General Instrument AY-3-8500 which was designed to make mass production of consoles possible. The chip actually contains several games, although PONG was the only one in use on the Coleco.

After removing the CPU from the non-functional console, [Dave] breathed life into it by providing a 2 MHz clock signal that was generated by an Arduino, of all things. A typical 2N2222 amplifies the audio, and a quick power up showed that the chip was working and generating audio.

Video is smartly taken care of just as it was in the original design, by combining various signals with a 4072 OR gate. With various video elements and synchronization patterns combined into a composite video signal, [Dave] was able to see the game on screen, but then realized that he’d need to design some “paddles”. We’ll leave that up to you to watch in the video, but make sure to check the comments section for more information on the design.

Is a breadboarded PONG console not retro enough for you? Then check out this old school mechanical version that was found languishing in a thrift store.

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Open World 3D Game Runs On The RP2040 Microcontroller

December 13, 2022 by Lewin Day 15 Comments

The Raspberry Pi RP2040 is versatile and cheap, but it’s by no means known as the most powerful microcontroller on the world. Regardless, it is capable of great things, as demonstrated by [Bernhard Strobl], who built a 3D open world game engine that runs on that very platform.

The graphics are simple, but with a compelling low-poly style.

The game engine itself is built to run on the Pimoroni PicoSystem, which is essentially a handheld gaming platform built around the RP2040 chip. The engine takes advantage of the multi-core nature of the RP2040, using the second core as a dedicated rasterizer to keep frames pumping out.

The basic game [Bernhard] built in the engine features 50 NPC characters and 50 further zombies, all running at the same time. Specs are impressive, with the engine’s included game simulating a “world” of 120 x 120 meters in size. As a maximum limit, the engine can handle a 2.56 x 2.56 km world, thanks to the use of 8-bit integers for directional data. However, limited storage space would make it difficult to achieve such a large world in practice.

We don’t get to see much of the gameplay in the YouTube video, but the quality of the graphics is impressive for such a cheap microcontroller. It seems within the bounds of possibility that an actual open-world game could be practical on the PicoSystem if only enough storage were available. Video after the break.

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