Atari’s Pac-Man Flop: How A Classic Went Off-Course

October 25, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 35 Comments

For fans of retro games, Pac-Man is nothing short of iconic—a game so loved it’s been ported to nearly every console imaginable. But the Atari 2600 version, released in 1982, left players scratching their heads – as laid out in a video by [Almost Something]. Atari had licensed Pac-Man to ride the wave of its arcade success, but the home version, programmed solely by [Todd Fry], missed the mark, turning an arcade icon into a surprising lesson in over-ambitious marketing.

Despite the hype, [Fry] faced an almost impossible task: translating Pac-Man’s detailed graphics and complex gameplay to the Atari’s limited 4 K cartridge with only 128 bytes of RAM. Atari’s strict limitations on black backgrounds and its choice to cut costs by sticking with a 4 K cartridge left the game barely recognizable. The famous pellet-chomping maze became simpler, colors were changed, and the iconic ghosts—reduced to single colors—flickered constantly. And then, Atari went all in, producing twelve million copies, betting on the success of universal appeal. In a twist, Pac-Man did sell in record numbers (over seven million copies) but still fell short of Atari’s expectations, leaving millions of unsold cartridges eventually dumped in a New Mexico landfill.

This debacle even kind of marked Atari’s 1983 decline. Still, Pac-Man survived the hiccup, evolving and outlasting its flawed adaptation on the 2600. If you’re interested in learning more about the ins and outs of game ports, check out the fantastic talk [Bob Hickman] gave during Supercon 2023.

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Mini DDR Cabinet Gets Maximum Upgrade

November 3, 2023 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Those shrunken-down arcade cabinets are a nifty idea, but they sure do suck in practice. At least, the Dance Dance Revolution game is full of empty promises. With the $25 cabinet, all you get are three songs that come out of a crappy little speaker, and a not-great display to match.

[BigRig Creates] endeavored to make it better, however, and managed to cram a Raspberry Pi 4 in the cabinet without disturbing the stock components too much. They did have to trim every extraneous piece of plastic from the inside of the cabinet and trim the I/O pins down, but it fit.

What didn’t fit are the fans that [BigRig Creates] needed once it was clear that it was necessary to overclock the Pi. As [BigRig Creates] points out, a custom PCB would have saved some room. And perhaps time. And definitely some wires.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple on the software side. (It never is, is it?) Even getting the screen to work was no picnic. But in the end, it worked, and even survived a bunch of gamers testing it out at LTX. Check it out after the break.

Got an old PS2 DDR controller? You could make it play Simon instead.

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Dante’s Inferno Arcade Reveals Your True Fate

October 31, 2021 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Many of us are vaguely familiar with the levels of hell described in Dante’s epic poem from the 14th century, even if we’ve never visited ourselves. It’s natural to wonder in which circle of hell one might end up, but that’s a question that [scubabear’s] arcade build seeks to answer.

The stand-up cabinet was built for The Magic Castle, Hollywood’s exclusive private club for the magic set. The design is loosely inspired by old-fashioned love testers, the sort of which you might have seen in that Simpsons episode. The club has traditionally issued members with unique RFID tags in keychains, which can be used to trigger special objects in the facility. In this case, when a member scans their keychain and places their hand on a handprint, the machine starts up.

The hand is detected by an Adafruit touch sensor board, and the machine begins determining the fate of the member while playing a short musical interlude. Once calculated by the Raspberry Pi within, the user’s name is read out based on the RFID data, and their destiny is read aloud. They’re then given a receipt stating their destination in hell, along with a quote from Dante’s Inferno.

It’s a fun game and one that we’d love to try out if we find ourselves visiting The Magic Castle one spooky day. It’s made all the better by the sheer quality of the cabinet and the associated illustrations from [Jeremy Owen.]

For those keen to do something similar, [scubabear] hasn’t skimped on the details of the construction nor the electronics that make it all work. We’ve seen other great builds too, from the carefully crafted to the glowiest you’ve ever seen. Video after the break.

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A game board with five LEDs and a hand shining a laser pointer at it

Laser Pointer And Arduino Make A Minimalistic Shooting Game

October 18, 2021 by Robin Kearey 7 Comments

Video games are great and all, but sometimes you just want the thrill of manipulating actual objects in addition to watching action on a screen. This must have been the reason why Nintendo’s Duck Hunt became so popular despite the simplicity of its gameplay. Prolific hacker [mircemk] similarly made a computer-plus-physical game called “Laser Shooter“, which somehow reminds us of the good old NES game.

The game is based on an Arduino Nano, to which five LEDs as well as five photoresistors (LDRs) are connected. When the game is started, the LEDs light up at random and the player has a limited time to “shoot” the corresponding LDR with a laser pointer. This time limit is decreased as the game progresses, and the game is over once the player fails to hit the target on time. The “Game Over” message is accompanied by a sad tune, but luckily no giggling dog.

Complete schematics and code are available for anyone willing to try their hand at replicating or improving this game. And no, you can’t simply sweep your laser across the five LDRs all the time, because you lose if you shoot at the wrong target. For more laser pointer-based games, try this Laser Command clone or this laser tag badge system.

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The Epic Saga Of Hacking Knights Of The Round

June 8, 2021 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

For the uninitiated, Knights of the Round was a hack-and-slash arcade game released by Capcom in 1991 that rather loosely followed the legend of King Arthur and the eponymous Knights of the Round Table. In it, up to three players make their way from stage to stage, vanquishing foes and leveling up their specific character’s weapons and abilities. But [Sebastian Mihai] was looking for a new way to experience this classic title, so he decided to reverse engineer the game and create his own version called Warlock’s Tower.

Those familiar with the original game will no doubt notice some of the differences right away while watching the video below, but for those who don’t have an intimate knowledge of Arthur’s digital adventures, the major changes are listed on the project’s web page. Among the most notable are the removal of cooperative multiplayer and stage time limits. This turns the game from a frantic beat ’em up to a more methodical adventure. Especially since you now have to compete the game in a single life. If we had to guess, we’d say [Sebastian] prefers his games to have a bit of a challenge to them.

Even if you aren’t interested in playing Warlock’s Tower yourself, the story of how [Sebastian] created it is absolutely fascinating. He started with zero knowledge of Motorola 68000 assembly, but by the end of the project, was wrangling multiple debuggers and writing custom tools to help implement the approximately 70 patches that make up the custom build.

The hundreds of hours of work that went into creating these patches is documented as a sort of stream of consciousness on the project page, allowing you to follow along in chronological order. Whether it inspires you to tackle your own reverse engineering project or makes you doubt whether or not you’ve got the patience to see it through, it’s definitely worth a read. If you’re a Knights of the Round fan, you should also take a look at the incredible wealth of information he’s amassed about the original game itself, which honestly serves as an equally impressive project in its own right.

Modified versions of classic games, known colloquially as “ROM hacks” are fairly common among serious fans who want to see their favorite games improved over time. While they aren’t always as ambitious as Warlock’s Tower, they all serve as examples of how a dedicated community can push a product well beyond the scope envisioned by its original creators.

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Light Replaces Electrons For Giant Vector-Graphics Asteroids Game

March 8, 2017 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

For all its simplicity, the arcade classic Asteroids was engaging in the extreme, with the ping of the laser, the rumble of the rocket, the crash of crumbling space rocks, and that crazy warble when the damn flying saucers made an appearance. Atari estimates that the game has earned operators in excess of $500 million since it was released in 1979. That’s two billion quarters, and we’ll guess a fair percentage of those coins came from the pockets of Hackaday’s readers and staff alike.

One iconic part of Asteroids was the vector display. Each item on the field was drawn as a unit by the CRT’s electron beam dancing across the phosphor rather than raster-scanned like TV was at the time. The simple graphics were actually pretty hard to create, and with that in mind, [standupmaths] decided to take a close look at the vector display of Asteroids and try to recreate it using a laser.

To be fair, [Seb Lee-Delisle] does all the heavy lifting here, with [standupmaths] providing context on the history and mathematics of the original vector display. [Seb] is a digital artist by trade, and has at the ready a 4-watt RGB laser projector for light shows and displays. Using the laser as a replacement for the CRT’s electron beam, [Seb] was able to code a reasonably playable vector-graphic version of Asteroids on a large projections screen. Even the audio is faithful to the original. The real treat comes when the laser is slowed and a little smoke added to show us how each item is traced out in order.

All [Seb]’s code is posted on GitHub, so if you have a laser projector handy, by all means go for it. Or just whip up a custom vector display for your own tabletop version of Asteroids.

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Oh No! It’s The Claw!

April 8, 2016 by Al Williams 7 Comments

What’s more seductive than a claw machine? After all, how hard can it be to snag that $2 teddy bear that is practically poking out of the pile of merchandise? But after 20 quarters, you realize you’ve spent $5, and you still don’t have anything to show for it.

[CreativeGuy88] decided to build his own claw machine (that way, he gets to keep the quarters). This sizable build is as much woodworking project as anything. However, the motors and control joysticks require electrical wiring and [CreativeGuy88] used Lego bricks to make much of the carriage.

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