[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbpq8NEWxYc]
[niles] has refined the art of making wallets out of game cartridges. Specifically, he is using Atari cartridges. He’s gotten down to about a two hour process which results in a decently usable wallet. We’ve seen someone make a cartridge wallet before, and we have to ask the same question; who wants to carry this around in their pocket?
[thanks yuppicide]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4]
Here’s another junk music performance to add to the list. [bd594] put together this rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on assorted computing equipment. The lead piano sound is from an Atari 800XL. Lead guitar is a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. An 8inch floppy plays bass while a HP ScanJet 3C covers the vocals. He had to dub the scanner four times to get all of the vocal parts. He wanted to use four independent scanners but the prices on eBay were forbidding. The use of oscilloscopes to show the wave forms in the video is a nice touch. Check out our post about Radiohead’s Nude for more examples of this.
[via adafruit]
[Ben Heck] posted this writeup about getting S-Video/composite out of an Atari 2600. This is actually the hack of [Longhorn Engineer], who showed it to [Ben] at a recent event. If any of you have tried to play these classics on a modern TV you may have found it to be quite difficult. If you manage to get it physically connected, through adapters and such, you may still have video issues. This alleviates that issue completely. After you solder this in, your Atari has native composite/S-video. As you can see in the video after the break, it seems to work pretty well.
It’s amazing what [Ben Heckendorn] can manage to crank out in just five hours. This time it’s a wireless Xbox 360 controller stuffed inside an Atari 2600 controller. The guts are from a Guitar Hero 3 controller. It’s a fairly compact board and [Ben] used thin ATA wire for the connections. While it doesn’t have all the buttons of a true Xbox controller, this 3600 controller has enough to make it useful in arcade games. The joystick portion was reused without any modification. Things like the guide button and ring of light are located underneath.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgb_NFdTHZc]
For people who miss the golden age of Atari music, you can recreate the magic of 8 bit music with the -hard plAYer-. [Tolaemon] put a lot of thought and work into this hardware player. From the AY-38912 programmable sound generator, which used to be in old computers like the Atari or Colour Genie, to working with the YM file format, each piece is put together with the utmost care. [Tolaemon] also provides his design, firmware(ZIP), and parts list so that you can make your own hardware player.
[via Matrixsynth]
Spark Fun’s centerpiece at Maker Faire back in May was this LED coffee table. They just recently posted about how it was constructed. The surface is made from 64 8×8 RGB LED matrix boards totaling 4096 LEDs. The eight rows are connected to a custom router board so that one SPI line can control the entire display. The main microcontroller is an Olimex LPC2106 dev board. It runs a four player cooperative pong game where multiple balls are added over time. Each player gets a classic Atari paddle for control. You can see a video of the table running a screensaver after the break. Continue reading “LED Coffee Table”
Like many nerds, we have our share of retro video games and nonworking consoles lying around. Every so often we feel like dragging one out and hoping it works.. Luckily for us, the Super Genintari is available to fulfill our fantasies of beating Ghosts ‘N Goblins. The Super Genintari is an Atari 2600, NES, SNES and Sega Genesis all rolled into one; you can even put in four cartridges at once and hook it up to your television with a simple AV cable.
[via DVICE]
