now this is truely going beyond the boundries of hacking. to even conjure up this kind of hack is not only awesome, but technically illegal because you can’t destroy money here in the USA. Well if you’re willing to risk breaking that law (we sure are) and you’ve got a silver dollar handy (or a quarter works we’ve gotten emails about). you just basically, bend the coin inward, polish the outside like a ring, then hollow out the inside to fit your finger.

thanks [AJ] and to all readers for letting us know how to identify currency <3

Continue reading “Coin To Bling Conversion” →

looks like our favorite critters from 4th grade are serving a new purpose. musically that is. the hampster movements are captured by mini-midi controllers of some sort, then fed into whatever you please. a synth rack, a keyboard, and roland tr-900. The possibilities are endless. It uses 6 hampsters, and a  C-based controller that react to their movement. pure genius.

Continue reading “MIDI Hamsters” →

Sure you know that Disco Stu from the simpsons has got all the moves, but what if you don’t and want to kick it like travolta? then there’s only one option: head up to MIT and check out their LED Disco Dance Floor. This thing is comprimised of 1,536 LEDs made by 20,000 hand soldered connections. that’s a lot of work. it can produce 4,096 colors, can be controlled through XMMS, handles 30fps, and the best part is that it’s 128 square feet. Yes. It’s a very impressive dance floor that has insane capability. there is a log kept which is very detailed and explains the process and how it became a technical nightmare. they made custom PCB controllers to use it and soldered day and night to complete it for a dance they were having. in the end it was pulled off and quite successfully. they also have an “epilogue” telling what changes they made after the dance to improve it. that’s MIT for ya.

thanks to everyone who sent this in.

Continue reading “MIT Disco LED Dance Floor” →

i’m really liking this one. A game modder who’s not even very good at programming (he keeps mentioning this) decided to make his own game out of the Super Mario Brothers (SMB) NES cartridge. He wrote the assembly (god help us all) to basically make clouds scroll across the screen and just clouds. The process shows how the graphics are contained on one chip and the code is on another. Also shown, is how to rip the chip out, re-program it with your code, and then how to shove it back in and make it work. You can see the final result by clicking here. We’d also love to see someone take a shot at this and to see what they could come up with.

Continue reading “Make Your Own Nes Game” →

benjamin heckendorn of portable playstation 2 fame has been working on a prototype for a mass produced portable atari 2600, code named ‘phoenix’.

it has a 3.5″ screen, takes 6 aa batteries, uses standard atari game cartridges, and will someday allow me to play hours and hours of joust and moon patrol on international flights.

ben recently started a phoenix blog to help us stay on top of the latest phoenix development news.  thanks for the tip jesse!

Continue reading “Portable Atari 2600” →