Arcades: Don’t Call It A Comeback

October 6, 2015 by Adam Fabio 14 Comments

Video arcades may be a thing of the past, but they’re still alive, well and were ready to play at this year’s World Maker Faire. The offerings weren’t old favorites, all were brand new games many being shown for the first time like the long-awaited VEC9. The Hall of Science building was filled with cabinets and no quarters were necessary, all were free-play.

Death By Audio Arcade was there in force with games like Particle Mace and Powerboat Italia ’88. Our personal favorite was Nothing Good Can Come of This. [Michael P. Consoli] devised a simple game: Two players in an empty room. A bullet drops from a hole in the ceiling, followed by a gun shortly thereafter. What happens next is up to the players. The simple graphics and gameplay give this title its charm. [Michael] was showing off a new stand-up cabinet for the game this year. He built the entire thing himself, working until the wee hours before load-in at Maker Faire.

[Batsly Adams], [Todd Bailey], and [Mike Dooley] teamed up to create what may be the first new vector arcade in decades. VEC9 has been teased for over 2 years. They’ve finally wrapped this game up and showed it off at the faire. VEC9 started with an old
Asteroids vector monitor found by [Batsly].

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Retro Games On ArduinoCade Just Shouldn’t Be Possible

September 17, 2015 by Kevin Dady 26 Comments

Making retro video games on today’s micro controllers brings many challenges, especially when using only the micro controller itself to handle the entire experience. Complex graphics, sound, game logic and input is taxing enough on the small chips, toss in NTSC color graphics and you have a whole different bear on your hands.

[rossum] set out making the Arduinocade retro game system using an overclocked Arduino Uno, and not much more. Supporting 4 voice sound and IR game controllers, the system also boasts 27 simultaneous colors all in software. These colors and the resolution feel like they’re impossible without a graphics chip to offload some of the work. While doing all of this the ATmega328p is also playing some faithful reproductions of classic arcade games.

The uses a couple of interesting tricks. Color is generated with NTSC color artifacts, where the screen is really black and white, but thanks to a delay or two in the signal generation the bits are out of phase from the reference “color burst” signal and appear on-screen as unique colors. This approach was used in the 8 bit Apple II personal computers to generate its colors, and also on the early IBM PC’s with CGA cards to drastically increase color depth. In this case, the chip is overclocked with a 28.6363 MHz crystal (a multiple of NTSC timing) and the SPI hardware leveraged to shift out all the necessary pixels. Check out how great it looks and sounds after the break.

It’s good to see an old trick on a new project and we are off to play some games!

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Engineers Create Super-Hard Whack-a-Mole

August 4, 2015 by Richard Baguley 6 Comments

Is your latest project driving you mad? Are you subject to occasional fits of rage? This project might help: for a class called elecanisms at Olin College, [Forrest] and a team of three other students made a whack-a-mole arcade game that lets you vent your rage on a helpless furry animal by whacking it with a large hammer. He built most of it from scratch, creating his own solenoid driver and LED sensor board. However, there is a twist in here that gives the moles a fighting chance: there is an accelerometer built into the hammer that lets them know that your heavy hammer of doom is approaching.

Will they escape before your righteous wrath descends upon them? That depends on how you decide to set it up, and how merciful you want to be. The build even includes a coin-operated pay-to-play slot. They kept the cost low at a penny, but this is just begging to be installed at the local pub to rake in those quarters.

This course has been the source of a few projects that we have featured before on Hackaday, including the Confectionary Canon, which tracks your face and fires marshmallows right into your gaping maw.

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Observercade, Portable MAME System Of The Future.

May 11, 2015 by Rich Bremer 8 Comments

[GarageMonkeySan] wrote in to tell us about his latest project. It’s a MAME arcade emulator, but not just any MAME arcade emulator, it is housed in a briefcase. And if that was not interesting enough, it was built in the style of the TV Show “Fringe”, specifically like the Observer briefcases. He calls it the Observercade.

The hard-shelled Samsonite briefcase was taken apart to assess the best way to move forward. A Sintra frame was added to the top half of the briefcase and would hold a scavenged laptop LCD screen. A monitor faceplate was then made from 1/16″ polystyrene sheet to fill the gap around the screen.

The bottom half of the case holds the remaining electronics, which consists of a Raspberry Pi Model B (running RetroPie), power supply, speakers and LCD driver board. They are all mounted to the bottom of the control surface which also supports the controller joystick and buttons. Notice that the buttons are labeled in Observer symbols. These symbols are as accurate as possible roughly translating to ‘credit’, ‘player’… etc. This is a wonderfully done project that shows [GarageMonkeySan] pays extreme attention to detail.

If the Observercade rings a bell, you may be remembering the project that gave [GarageMonkeySan] his inspirations: the Briefcade.

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Scratch-Built Bar Top MAME Cabinet

April 7, 2015 by Rich Bremer 6 Comments

Video game enthusiast [Mike] is all about the journey and not necessarily the destination. That is why he likes working on projects and documenting their progress with great detail. His bar top MAME machine is certainly no exception.

One of [Mike’s] goals was to see if he could keep the look and feel of a large arcade cabinet but scale it down so that it was portable. He started with drawing up a model in Sketchup. Once satisfied with the layout and making sure everything would fit, the side panels were cut out of pine boards and will only be clear-coated. The remaining panels are cut from MDF as they will be covered in a matching decorative vinyl wrap.

The control panel may look simple but a lot of thought went into it. Of course, there is a joystick but [Mike] chose to only use 4 game-play buttons. He did this to save space and estimates he’ll still be able to play 90% of the available MAME games. Those 4 buttons are illuminated and the MAME front end, Mala, was configured to light up only the functional buttons for the particular game being played. Front and center on the control board is a rotary encoder for playing games like Arkanoid or games requiring a steering wheel.

In the end this build came out pretty nice looking. His build log is a great reference to hit before starting your next arcade cabinet project.

Although [Mike] calls his MAME cabinet ‘mini’, it’s not the most mini we’ve seen here on Hackaday.

Meme Themed Pinball Machine – Much Flipping, Y U No Win?!

December 18, 2014 by Matt Freund 10 Comments

Summoning 4chans, 9gags, Reddits and other denizens of easily-digested content, Liberty Games stripped apart a dilapidated “Baby Doll” pinball arcade machine and turned it into this meme-spouting monstrosity. A complete redo of the vinyl and graphics to sport dozens of familiar internet tropes was first, then they had Shapeways create internal scenery and finally some electronics were added to spice things up.

We have seen PINMAME-based digital machines but this took a different path. Pinball machines this old pre-date common transistors so they rely on electro-mechanicals for everything. This made hacking the machine challenging so the team intercepted most of the signals and tied them into a Raspberry Pi with a Pi-face interface board. A videoscreen was added to the scoreboard, triggering all manner of memey videos and sounds according to actions performed and unlocked on the screen.

If you yearn for expired pranks of years gone by and are bad at pinball, you are in luck. Losing the game gets you Rickrolled – over and over again. On the plus side, Nyan Cat rockets away to bonuses and even the Admiral himself warns you of impending danger.

We resisted the urge to write this article as a chain of one meme to the next, you will get plenty of that from the well-documented project conversion and the following video. Someone in the comments will probably make a list of all memes.

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A Tiny Arcade Machine With Tinier Buttons

November 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

Building a MAME machine around a Raspberry Pi has been the standard build for years now, and tiny versions of full-sized arcade machines have gone from curiosity to commonplace. [diygizmo] just built one of these tiny arcades, but the fit and finish of this one puts it above all others. There’s a real, miniature joystick in there, along with 3D printed adapters for tact switches to make this one look like a lilliputian version of a full size standup MAME cabinet.

The entire enclosure is 3D printed, and most of the electronics are exactly what you would expect: A Raspberry Pi, 2.5″ LCD, and a battery-powered speaker takes up most of the BOM. Where this build gets interesting is the buttons and joystick: after what we’re sure was a crazy amount of googling, [diygizmo] found something that looks like a normal arcade joystick, only smaller. Unable to find a suitable replacement for arcade buttons, [diygizmo] just printed their own, tucked a tact switch behind the plastic, and wired everything up.

Add in some decals, paint, and the same techniques used to create plastic model miniatures, and you have a perfect representation of a miniature arcade machine.