Nintendo Power Glove Achieves Its Promise As Vive Controller

October 14, 2017 by Jenny List 11 Comments

You have to hand it to Nintendo, for blazing the virtual reality trail in consumer products a couple of decades before everyone else, even if the best that can be said for their efforts in that direction is that they weren’t exactly super-successful. Their 1989 Power Glove became little more than a difficult-to-use peripheral for everyday console games, and their 1995 Virtual Boy console was streets ahead of its time but had a 3D effect that induced discomfort in its players.

Many years later though, the Power Glove remains an intriguing product, and one that can be readily found second-hand. The folks at Teague Labs think that perhaps its time has come as the basis of a peripheral for modern VR systems, as a controller for the HTC Vive.

They’ve taken a Power Glove, and through an Arduino Due with a custom shield, interfaced it to the Vive controller mounted where the buttons would have been in its Nintendo days. The Vive provides positional data, while the Nintendo sensors provide hand data. Thus they’ve made an accomplished glove peripheral with a lot less heartache than they would have seen had they done so from scratch.

They show us a couple of environments using the glove, an iPad simulation which we’re having a little difficulty getting our heads round, and a rock/paper/scissors game which looks rather fun. If you are interested in further work, all their code is on GitHub.

We’ve shown you another hugely-upgraded Power Glove in the past, but how about one controlling a quadcopter?

An Old Video Game Controller On Even Older Computer

October 6, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

For those of us not old enough to remember, and also probably living in the States, there was a relatively obscure computer built by Microsoft in the early 80s that had the strong Commodore/Atari vibe of computers that were produced before PCs took over. It was known as the MSX and only saw limited release in the US, although was popular in Japan and elsewhere. If you happen to have one of these and you’d like to play some video games on it, though, there’s now a driver (of sorts) for SNES controllers.

While the usefulness of this hack for others may not help too many people, the simplicity of the project is elegant for such “ancient” technology. The project takes advantage of some quirks in BASIC for reading a touch-pad digitizer connected to the joystick port using the SPI protocol. This is similar enough to the protocol used by NES/SNES controllers that it’s about as plug-and-play as 80s and 90s hardware can get. From there, the old game pad can be used for anything that the MSX joystick could be used for.

We’ve seen a handful of projects involving the MSX, so while it’s not as popular as Apple or Commodore, it’s not entirely forgotten, either. In fact, this isn’t even the first time someone has retrofitted a newer gaming controller to an MSX: the Wii Nunchuck already works for these machines.

Running The SNES Classic Mini Emulator On The Raspberry Pi

October 6, 2017 by Lewin Day 30 Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d be familiar with Nintendo’s hugely popular Classic Mini consoles. Starting with the NES, and now followed with the SNES, the consoles ship in a cute, miniature enclosure and emulate Nintendo classics using the horsepower of modern ARM chips. These consoles use an emulator that has been created especially for the purpose by Nintendo, in house – and ~~[Morris]~~ [krom] wanted to see if he could take the emulator on the SNES Classic Mini and run it on the Raspberry Pi.

Yes, there are already SNES emulators on the Raspberry Pi. But anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of emulation can see the clear interest in the tricks and techniques Nintendo are using to achieve the feat. In particular, Nintendo engineers have the benefit of access to internal documentation that can make the job a lot easier, particularly when dealing with edge cases.

[krom] has been kind enough to share the full instructions necessary to recreate this feat. One stumbling block was the difference in hardware between the Raspberry Pi and the SNES Classic Mini – the Pi using a Broadcom GPU instead of the SNES’s Mali hardware. However, a workaround was simple enough – swapping out some libraries was all that was required. It also gives some interesting insight – it looks like the SNES Classic Mini relies on the SDL libraries to run.

While emulation of the SNES has been a largely solved problem for quite some time, it’s great to see more work going on in the field. In particular, the official Nintendo emulation is reported to be particularly adept at running games that rely on the SuperFX chip.

For another take on SNES emulation, try out your old Mario games on the HoloLens.

Thanks [Morris] for the tip!

Playing Mario On An Oscilliscope

September 23, 2017 by Rich Hawkes 8 Comments

Any display can be connected to a microcontroller and used as a display if you know the protocol to use and have enough power in your micro. Sometimes, an odd display is used just “because it’s there.” This seems to be the case for Reddit user [phckopper], who has used a STM32 and a PS2 joystick to play a version of a Mario game on an oscilloscope.

There’s not many technical details but [phckopper] lets us know that the rendering is done using the SPI on the STM, transferred via DMA, which is synchronized to two saw-tooth waves that are fed in to the X and Y axes of the oscilloscope. The Z axis, which controls the brightness of the dot, is fed from the MOSI. By making the oscilloscope range all over the screen, similar to the way a CRT’s gun does, [] is able to draw sprites, rather than vector graphics. The display has a resolution of 400×400 and each sprite is 16×16. The input is from a PS2 joystick connected to [phckopper]’s PC, with the information communicated over UART using a simple protocol.

We don’t get to see much of the game in the video after the break, but it’s a pretty impressive job nonetheless, especially when you realize that [phckopper] did this project when he was just sixteen! There are a couple of other oscilloscope projects here at Hackaday, like this one, a great version of pong played on the ‘scope, or this one, showing off some great graphics.

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A Switched Game Boy Advance SP

June 26, 2017 by Michael Uttmark 10 Comments

After Nintendo’s wild success with the Wii U, Nintendo released it’s Nintendo Switch. The switch functions primarily as a home console, stagnantly connected to a display. However, Nintendo switched things up a bit: the Switch can be removed from its dock for standalone tablet-like use. But there’s a slight problem: when the Switch is in portable mode, it leaves behind a bleak and black box. What’s one to do? Worry not: [Alexander Blake] is here to save the day with a Game Boy Advance SP and an X-Acto knife.

After casually noting that the main control board of the Switch was roughly Game Boy Advance SP sized, [Alexander Blake], aka [cptnalex], knew it was meant to be. After retrieving his broken Game Boy Advance SP from his closet, [cptnalex] set to work turning his Game Boy into a Nintendo Switch dock. When he was done, the results were stunning, especially considering the fact that this is his first console mod. Moreover, the very fact that he did it all with an X-Acto knife rather than a Dremel is astounding.

With the screen providing support to the Switch, [cptnalex’s] design leaves some to be desired for long term use. But we know for sure that [cptnalex’s] design does, in fact, work. Due to naysayers of the internet^TM, [cptnalex] filmed a video of his dock in uses (embedded after the break). But, what the design lacks in structural stability, it more than makes up for in aesthetics. On the device itself, [cptnalex’s] history with controller painting shines through.

If you want to see more of [cptnalex’s] work, you can follow him on Instagram. For more console mods that will take your breath away, look no farther than [Bungle’s] vacuum formed portable N64.

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Super Mario World Jailbreak Requires No External Hardware

June 3, 2017 by Adam Fabio 24 Comments

[SethBling] has released a Super Mario World jailbreak that allows players to install a hex editor, then write, install and run their own game mods. What’s more is this all works on unmodified cartridges and SNES hardware. No hardware hacks required.

[Seth] is quick to say he didn’t do all this alone. This mod came to be thanks to help from [Cooper Harasyn] who discovered a save file corruption glitch, [MrCheese] who optimized the hex editor, and [p4plus2] who wrote some awesome mods.

While no soldering and programming of parts are required, installing this mod still requires quite a bit of hardware. Beyond the SNES and cartridge, you’ll need two multitaps, three controllers, and clamps to hold down buttons on the controllers. Even then the procedure will take about an hour of delicate on-screen gymnastics. Once the jailbreak is installed though, it is kept in savegame C, so you only have to do it once.

What does a hex editor allow you to do? Anything you want. Mario’s powerup state can be edited, one memory location can be modified to complete a level anytime you would like. It’s not just modifying memory locations though – you can write code that runs, such as [p4plus2’s] sweet telekinesis mod that allows Mario to grab and move around any enemy on the screen.

It’s always awesome to see old video game hardware being hacked on by a new generation of hackers. We’ve seen similar work done on Super Mario Brothers 3, and an original GameBoy used to pilot a drone, just to name a couple.

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HDMI Out On The Gameboy Advance

May 30, 2017 by Lewin Day 35 Comments

The Gameboy line of handheld systems from Nintendo have been wildly popular, but lack one major thing – a video output. This can be troublesome if you’d like to view the games on a bigger screen, for more comfortable gaming sessions or detail work like producing chiptunes. One option is to use the Gameboy Player for the Gamecube, however that system’s age means you’re out of luck if you want a crisp, clear picture on a modern digital display. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get HDMI output from a Gameboy Advance Instead?

When it comes to working with video signals, FPGAs can’t be beat. [Stephen] leverages an FPGA in this project to read the GBA’s video signals and convert them to the modern digital format. Unfortunately, it’s not a seamless install – limited space means the GBA’s screen must be entirely removed, replaced with the adapter in a manner resembling the terrifying Facehugger.

Packaging aside, the output from the device is nothing short of stunning – the graphics are absolutely crystal clear when displayed on a modern HDMI television. This is because the FPGA is capturing the exact digital output from the GBA, and piping it out as HDMI – there’s no analog fuzziness, conversions or noise to spoil the image. Output is a tasty 1280×720, upscaled from the GBA’s original resolution. For more details, check out the forum thread where [Stephen] runs through the build.

The only thing missing is details – we’d love to know more about the exact hardware used, and any trials and tribulations during the build! As far as we can tell, the build doesn’t stop at just video – a SNES controller is used instead of the original buttons, and we have a feeling sound is being passed over the HDMI channel as well sound is piped to the TV from the GBA’s headphone port.

It’s great to see these projects for old hardware come out – modern hardware has the muscle to achieve things previously unthinkable on retro consoles. We’ve seen similar projects before – like adding VGA to an original Game Boy.

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