Mini Pinball MAME Machine Is Small Enough To Fit In Any Game Room

May 28, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

A huge collection of pinball machines in your basement is one of the crowing achievements of a geek, but what if you could have a huge library of physical pinball machines at you fingertips? [veriix] shared an imgur gallery in a reddit post documenting his wee little pinball machine he built from scratch.

Inside the pinball cabinet, there are two monitors. A 4:3 Samsung monitor serves as the backglass for the machine while a 23″ HDTV provides the playfield. On the software side of things, [veriix] used PINMAME and Visual Pinball 9 running on an old motherboard he had lying around. The result is impressive. The HD monitor playfield provides the right perspective to fool [veriix]’s brain into thinking he’s playing a real pinball machine.

We’ve seen PINMAME builds before, but those were encased in full-size pinball cabinets that took up far too much room. [veriix]’s machine is much smaller, and perfect for the garage, den, basement, or anywhere you’d like to set up an awesome game room.

You can check out [veriix] playing his mini pinball machine after the break. Thanks [Johnny] for sending this one in.

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Soldering From The Hip

May 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

You can be the Sheriff around these parts, but only if you have a solder gun and holster to boot. [Mikasaurus’] latest build is certainly fun, even if it’s not so practical. We’re not giving up our Weller knock-off any time soon, but this quick-heat repackage will certainly be a conversation starter at your next Hackerspace event.

The business end of the build is taken from a cheap four-battery soldering iron. [Mike] separated each of the components, then grabbed a toy gun to see where each of them might fit. The batteries are just the right size to fit into the gun’s magazine. All he had to do to make that happen is add contacts to the gun and springs to the magazine. A momentary push switch was positioned behind the trigger and used to connect the battery pack to the solder tip.

After the break you’ll find a little over-the-top modeling, and some solder melting. This will go great with that 9mm Bluetooth headset you built. Just don’t stick the wrong one in your ear.

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Fisher-Price Record Player Plays Stairway To Heaven

May 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

[Fred Murphy] has an old Fisher-Price music box/record player that has lost many of its disks over the last 40 years. It’s a very simple device – concentric grooves in a plastic disk have plastic bumps that are picked up by the tines of the record player ‘cartridge.’ Seeing as how this toy is basically a music box, [Fred] figured making his own records would be well within his grasp; he did the reasonable thing and made a Stairway to Heaven disk for a toy music box.

To figure out where to place the ‘bumps’ for the musical tines, [Fred] built a small tool in Visual C# 2010 that allowed him to place notes on a scale and generate the requisite GCode for the disk. After sending this file to his CNC mill, [Fred] had an acrylic disk that played Led Zeppelin on a child’s music box.

Of course, this Instructable wouldn’t be complete without a video demo of Stairway blasting out of this record player. You can check that out after the break.

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Putting Linux On The Vtech InnoTab

May 24, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

The Vtech InnoTab is a child-sized tablet computer built for kids. Apart from being the ideal solution to keeping the grubby, sticky hands of nieces and nephews away from proper ‘adult sized’ tablets, it can also serve as a Linux tablet perfect for a few homebrew apps. [Mick] picked up an InnoTab for his son, but after getting BusyBox working, we’re thinking it has become a toy for the father and not the son.

[Mick] cracked open the InnoTab and soldered a few wires to a pair of pins that connect to a TTL level converter and then to a TV. There’s a full Linux shell running on [Mick]’s new tablet, encouragement enough for him to start porting ScummVM, the engine behind famous LucasArts point-and-click adventure games of the early 90s.

Right now, it’s still very much a work in progress, but [Mick] has full screen support and a virtual keyboard working; more than enough to enjoy Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road. After the break you can see the video of [Mick]’s InnoTab running the much more child-friendly SCUMM adventure Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, something we’re sure his son will love.

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Light Trikes Allow You To Pedal For Your Life

May 21, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 2 Comments

Unfortunately, none of our writers are located in California this year. This means that we weren’t able to go to the Bay Area MakerFaire and see the cool stuff for ourselves. We have been following along on the web though and a few projects have caught our eye. The rig you see above is a physical controller for a game that was inspired by the classic Tron light cycle. The gameplay is pretty obvious, you pedal the trike to go and turn the handlebars to turn your light tricycle. The hardware seems fairly simple, they’re using an arduino to collect information from the bike, then sending that through NetLab hub, a cross platform toolkit for taking data from a micro controller and feeding it to flash. We think they did a fantastic job on the presentation, this actually looks like fun to play.

For some reason though, we want them to build a level that looks like the Stanley Hotel.

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Building A 6502 In Minecraft

May 20, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

We’ll admit that we haven’t been following Minecraft like we used to; its been a while since we’ve seen something amazing in Minecraft, but [eloraam]’s 6502 emulator (part of her RedPower Minecraft mod) takes the cake.

The RedPower mod adds a lot of industrial technology to Minecraft. Pumps, solar panels, and pneumatic tubes to move blocks around are the staple of this mod, but with the addition of a fully emulated 6502 computer, Minecraft moves from an anachronistic medieval-themed steampunk aesthetic to a full-on machine age, mainframes everywhere style.

The heart of the 6502 portion of the RedPower mod are three craftable blocks; a CPU, a monitor, and a disk drive. All these blocks are connected together with ribbon cables and can interact with other blocks in the Minecraft universe. The CPU is an emulated 6502, with a few instructions borrowed from the 65816 and the addition of MUL and DIV. It’s possible to program this computer in assembly, but [eloraam] a Forth interpreter with the OS to make programming a little easier.

It’s been almost two years since we first saw the beginnings of a CPU made in Minecraft, but this mod takes everything to the next level. In actuality, this isn’t very different from the game [notch] is currently working on; both feature an emulated 80’s era computer that can do all your in-game bidding. We can’t imagine anything better to get us hooked on Minecraft again, and we’ve got to commend [eloraam] for some seriously awesome work.

After the break is a 23-minute tutorial on the functions of the RedPower CPU, as demonstrated by Minecraft aficionado [direwolf20].

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Cardboard Kinetic Creatures

May 16, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

Browsing around today, I saw this little kit on kickstarter called Kinetic Creatures. These flat packed models are made from cardboard and can be assembled without tools. Their mechanical legs are operated either by a simple cam that you turn by hand or by a motorized attachment. I love the basic idea here. This is the kind of thing that my 6 year old would really enjoy doing that also serves to get him into making things (he’d probably insist on motorizing it with scraps, he collects dc motors and has quite a collection).

I did notice that they mentioned using it as a robotic platform, adding custom electronics to the empty space allowed in the body of the animal. This initially got me quite excited, thinking that I could, for $30 have a 1 foot tall quadruped platform that looked awesome, then I realized it can’t turn. I guess I’ll have to hack it a little bit to put separate drives in for each side. That would be a cool upgrade they could offer.

Have any of you tried to do turning with a set of only 4 [jansen] legs before?