PirateCade Is An Impressive Feat Of Woodworking And Design

August 12, 2014 by James Hobson 17 Comments

Retro Arcade Machine Keeps the Classics

A six month journey of blood sweat and tears is finally over for [David Carver] and what he is left with is nothing short of beautiful. He calls it the PirateCade. We call it the perfect arcade cabinet.

This project is actually [David’s] very first Raspberry Pi project – at least it was, until his Pi crapped out on him. After running into too many problems with it and SD card corruptions, [David] decided against the RetroPie project platform and decided to upgrade to a full-blown PC, using an AtomicFE front-end and the Ultimark Ipac.

The entire cabinet is hand made out of solid wood; he didn’t have access to any fancy CNC routers or laser cutters. We gotta hand it to him, he’s quite the cabinet maker for an electronics guy. Continue reading “PirateCade Is An Impressive Feat Of Woodworking And Design” →

ASTROGUN Is Like Asteroids On Steroids

July 27, 2014 by Rick Osgood 50 Comments

Astrogun

As the Jerusalem mini Makerfaire approached, [Avishay] had to come up with something to build. His final project is something he calls ASTROGUN. The ASTROGUN is a sort of augmented reality game that has the player attempting to blast quickly approaching asteroids before being hit.

It’s definitely reminiscent of the arcade classic, Asteroids. The primary difference is that the player has no space ship and does not move through space. Instead, the player has a first person view and can rotate 360 degrees and look up and down. The radar screen in the corner will give you a rough idea of where the asteroids are coming from. Then it’s up to you to actually locate them and blast them into oblivion before they destroy you.

The game is built around a Raspberry Pi computer. This acts as the brains of the operation. The Pi interfaces with an MPU-9150 inertial measurement unit (IMU). You commonly see IMU’s used in drones to help them keep their orientation. In this case, [Avishay] is using it to track the motion and orientation of the blaster. He claims nine degrees of freedom with this setup.

The Pi generates the graphics and sends the output to a small, high-brightness LCD screen. The screen is mounted perpendicular to the player’s view so the screen is facing “up”. There is a small piece of beam splitting glass mounted above the display at approximately a 45 degree angle. This is a special kind of glass that is partially reflective and partially translucent. The result is that the player sees the real-world background coming through the glass, with the digital graphics overlaid on top of that. It’s similar to some heads-up display technologies.

All of the electronics fit either inside or mounted around a toy gun. The display system was attached with a custom-made fiberglass mount. The code appears to be available via Github. Be sure to watch the video of the system in action below. Continue reading “ASTROGUN Is Like Asteroids On Steroids” →

Playing DOOM On An ATM

July 26, 2014 by Rick Osgood 30 Comments

There aren’t too many details available about this hack, but we still thought it was interesting enough to share. YouTube user [Aussie50] seems to have figured out a way to install DOOM on an automated teller machine (ATM). Not only is the system running the software, it also appears that they are using the ATM’s built-in buttons to control the action in-game.

Many ATM’s today are simply computers that run a version of Windows, so one would assume it shouldn’t be too difficult to get an older game like DOOM running on the hardware. Towards the beginning of the video, you can quickly get a glimpse of what appears to be a default Windows XP background screen. You can see later in the video that [Aussie50] drops to what appears to be an MS-DOS command line. It stands to reason then that this particular model of ATM does run on Windows XP, but that [Aussie50] may have had to install MS-DOS emulation software such as DOSBOX as well.

At one point in the video, the camera man mentions they are using an I-PAC2. Some research will show you that this little PCB is designed to do USB keyboard emulation for arcade games. It looks like you can just hook up some simple momentary switches and the I-PAC2 will translate that into USB keyboard commands. It is therefore likely that [Aussie50] has hooked up the ATM’s buttons directly to this I-PAC2 board and bypassed the original button controller circuit altogether.

It is also mentioned in the video that [Aussie50] was able to get the receipt printer working. It would be interesting to somehow incorporate this into the DOOM game. Imagine receiving a receipt with your high score printed on it. This also gets us thinking about other possibilities of gaming on ATM hardware. Can you configure the game to require a deposit before being able to play? Can you configure it to dispense cash if you beat the high score? What if you modified the multiplayer deathmatch mode so all players must pay an entry fee and the winner takes all? What creative ideas can you come up with for gaming on ATM hardware? Continue reading “Playing DOOM On An ATM” →

Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum

July 17, 2014 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Don’t call it an arcade. There are arcade-like things about it… like dance-based video games, Skee-ball, and tickets — oh so many tickets. But Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum is a one-of-a-kind that you need to visit next time you’re in the North suburbs of Detroit, Michigan.

[Marvin] was there in person, as he is many days. He talked with us for a few minutes and we’ve folded his interview, along with footage of many of the attractions, into the video above.

He’s been collecting for more than three decades. The attractions are packed into every bit of floor space, spilling up onto the walls, and hanging from every spot in the ceiling. There are true antiques from both home and abroad that could be referred to as automatons, rows of fortune tellers, a track of large airplane models that make a loop around the establishment when fed a quarter, and much more.

Some of the attractions were build for him, like the robot band you can make out behind [Marvin] during the interview. It is a MIDI-based build that allows songs to be selected from a touchscreen. Soon to be on exhibit is a Tesla-coil-based offering which [Marvin] commissioned after taking second place to [Nicolai Tesla] on a list of oddest museums.

Continue reading “Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum” →

Broken Laptop Lives Again In Skull ‘n Wrenches Arcade Cabinet

July 2, 2014 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

We’re pretty fond of home-built arcade cabinets, especially when those cabinets feature a giant HaD logo on the front. We teased you with a picture of two predators playing it at Maker Faire Kansas City, and we thought you might like to see what makes it tick.

[Dustin and Nick] have dubbed this the Dustin and Nick Arcade [DNA]. They built the cabinet from the ground up out of 5/8″ MDF, primed it, and painted it with exterior paint to ward off moisture damage. At the heart of this build is the bottom half of a laptop that suffered from a broken screen. The plexiglass overlay lets players view the guts of the thing, which we think is a nice touch that literally exemplifies Open Design.

So, what happens when you drop your proverbial coin? [Dustin and Nick] used an C# NES/SNES emulator that runs from the command line using a WPF interface. [Nick]’s software selects the appropriate emulator for the approximately 700 available games. You’ll find [Nick]’s code and a ton of build pics at [Dustin]’s site. No wonder they won a Maker of Merit ribbon!

Don’t have the space to build a full-scale cabinet? You could make a mini Ms. Pac-Man cabinet, but then you’d only have Ms. Pac-Man to play with. And we’re pretty sure she’s spoken for.

Hackaday Links: June 15, 2014

June 15, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Love the classic brick Game Boy, but hate the low-contrast LCD, terrible battery life, and the inability to play Pokemon Emerald? This one’s just for you. It’s the ultimate DMG Game Boy – a Game Boy Advance SP stuffed (is it stuffed if it’s taking up more room?) into the classic Game Boy enclosure. Forum thread.

Zooming in to a microchip. It starts off with a DSLR and ends up on a scanning electron microscope. This is an older chip, and the CPU you’re using right now probably has much smaller features.

Every movie and every TV show set in space invariably has space helmets with LEDs pointing towards the face. Think how annoying that would be for an astronaut. Here’s how you add LEDs to a space helmet for a nice theatrical effect. Just don’t use it on a real EVA.

Everyone’s favorite crowdfunded space probe can apparently be detected with an 8-foot dish. That’s the same size as an old C-band dish, a.k.a West Virginia wildflowers. We know some of you have one of these out there, so go make a ~2GHz feed horn, grab a USB TV dongle, write it up, and send it in.

Alright, MAME cabinets. Say you want to go old-school and have a CRT. Some arcade games use a vertically oriented display, while other, slightly more modern games use a horizontally mounted display. How do you fix this? Get a big bearing, of course. This one allows a 19″ CRT to be rotated 90 degrees – all you need, really, if you’re switching between Pacman and Mortal Kombat.

Hey mechanical keyboard enthusiasts! Here’s some Hackaday Cherry MX keycaps. Informal interest check in the comments below. Suggestions welcome.

Mini Ms. Pacman

June 2, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

The bragging rights of owning a vintage arcade machine are awesome, but the practicality of it – restoring what is likely a very abused machine, and the sheer physical space one requires – doesn’t appeal to a lot of people. [Jason] has a much better solution to anyone who wants a vintage arcade machine, but doesn’t want the buyer’s remorse that comes with the phrase, “now where do we put it?” It’s a miniaturized Ms. Pacman, mostly scale in every detail.

The cabinet is constructed out of 1/8″ plywood, decorated with printed out graphics properly scaled down from the full-size machine. Inside is a BeagleBone Black with a 4.3″ touchscreen, USB speakers, and a battery-backed power supply.

The control system is rather interesting. Although [Jason] is using an analog joystick, the resistive touch screen monopolizes the ADC on the BeagleBone. The solution to this problem would be to write a driver, or if you’re [Jason], crack the joystick open and scratch away the resistive contact until you have a digital joystick. A nice solution, considering Ms. Pacman doesn’t use an analog joystick anyway.

Pictures over on [Jason]’s G+ page, along with a vertical video that G+ displays properly. Thanks, Google.