Coleco In Spat With ColecoVision Community

May 25, 2017 by Jenny List 82 Comments

If you were a child of the late 1970s or early 1980s, the chances are that your number one desire was to own a games console. The one to have was the Atari 2600, notwithstanding that dreadful E.T. game.

Of course, there were other consoles during that era. One of these also-ran products came from Coleco, a company that had started in the leather business but by the mid 1970s had diversified into handheld single-game consoles. Their ColecoVision console of 1982 sold well initially, but suffered badly in the video game crash of 1983. By 1985 it was gone, and though Coleco went on to have further success, by the end of the decade they too had faded away.

The Coleco story was not over though, because in 2005 the brand was relaunched by a successor company. Initially it appeared on an all-in-one retro console, and then on an abortive attempt to crowdfund a new console, the Coleco Chameleon. This campaign came to a halt after the Chameleon prototypes were shown to be not quite what they seemed by eagle-eyed onlookers. Continue reading “Coleco In Spat With ColecoVision Community” →

Portable RetroPie Builds On The Shoulders Of Giants

January 12, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 36 Comments

For anyone wanting to get that shot of nostalgia without the hassle of finding an NES Classic, the Retropie project is a great starting point. Of course, it’s not too noteworthy to grab a Raspberry Pi, throw a pre-built distribution on it, and plug in an SNES to USB converter. What is noteworthy, however, is building a Retropie that’s portable and that has the quality and polish of the latest build from [fancymenofcornwood].

For starters, the laser cut wood case was custom-made. From there, all of the PCBs were fitted including specific ones to handle each set of buttons (complete sets of D-pads, shoulder buttons, and joysticks) and another for the 5″ HDMI screen. It has stereo speakers and its own headphone jack (to the envy of all new iPhone owners), and is powered from a Raspberry Pi 2 running Retropie 4.1. The battery pack shouldn’t leave you stranded, either, especially not if you grew up playing the Sega Game Gear.

The quality of the build here is outstanding, and its creator made a design choice to make it easily replicable, so if you’ve wanted to play N64 or PS1 games while on the go, this might be what you’ve been waiting for. There are lots of other options for getting some fun from a Retropie going though, from building one into a coffee table to re-purposing that infamous Game Gear.

Obligatory clip of this portable playing Doom is found after the break.

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How To Add More Games To The NES Classic

January 10, 2017 by Zoe Skyforest 25 Comments

The hype around the NES Classic in 2016 was huge, and as expected, units are already selling for excessively high prices on eBay. The console shipped with 30 games pre-installed, primarily first-party releases from Nintendo. But worry not — there’s now a way to add more games to your NES Classic!

Like many a good hack, this one spawned from a forum community. [madmonkey] posted on GBX.ru about their attempts to load extra games into the console. The first step is using the FEL subroutine of the Allwinner SOC’s boot ROM to dump the unit’s flash memory. From there, it’s a matter of using custom tools to inject extra game ROMs before reburning the modified image to the console. The original tool used, named hakchi, requires a Super Mario savegame placed into a particular slot to work properly, though new versions have already surfaced eliminating this requirement.

While this is only a software modification, it does come with several risks. In addition to bricking your console, virus scanners are reporting the tools as potentially dangerous. There is confusion in the community as to whether these are false positives or not. As with anything you find lurking on a forum, your mileage may vary. But if you just have to beat Battletoads for the umpteenth time, load up a VM for the install process and have at it. This Reddit thread (an expansion from the original pastebin instructions) acts as a good starting point for the brave.

Only months after release, the NES Classic is already a fertile breeding ground for hacks — last year we reported on this controller mod and how to install Linux. Video of this ROM injection hack after the break.

Continue reading “How To Add More Games To The NES Classic” →

Wii U RetroPie Console Looks Gorgeous

November 1, 2016 by James Hobson 8 Comments

What to do with your broken gaming consoles? Gut it and turn it into a different gaming console! Sudomod forum user [banjokazooie] has concocted his own RetroPie console from the husk of a WiiU controller — an ingenious demonstration of how one can recycle hardware to a perfectly suited purpose.

[banjokazooie] actually used an original shell for this build, but if you happen to have a broken controller around — or know someone who does — this is a great use for it. A Raspberry Pi 3 is the brains of this operation (not counting [banjokazooie]), and it features a 6.5″ HDMI display, a Teensy 2.0 setup for the inputs, a headphone jack with automatic speaker disconnection, dual 3400 mAh batteries, an external SD card slot, and a lot of hard work on the power supply circuit — although [banjokazooie] reports that the hardest part was cutting to size a custom PCB to mount it all on. The original plan was to see if the idea was possible, and after a three month effort, it appears to work beautifully.

Continue reading “Wii U RetroPie Console Looks Gorgeous” →

One Home Made NES To Rule Them All

October 27, 2016 by Jenny List 10 Comments

The Nintendo Entertainment System, or Famicom depending on where in the world you live, is a console that occupies a special place in the hearts of people of a certain age. If you lived in a country that Nintendo didn’t ship its consoles to in the late ’80s and early ’90s though, you might think that it would be an experience that would have passed you by. Eastern Europeans for instance didn’t officially meet Mario for years.

A Pegasus NES clone. Ktoso the Ryba [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Fortunately for them there was an industry of Chinese and Taiwanese clone makers whose products were readily available in those markets. For the countries without official Nintendo products it is these consoles and their brand names that have achieved cult gaming status rather than the real thing.

In Poland, [phanick] wanted to recreate his youth by building his own clone console (Polish Language, English translation via Google Translate). His chosen target was the Pegasus, the Taiwanese NES clone that was the must-have console for early ’90s Poles.

But he wasn’t just satisfied with building a Pegasus clone. Along the way the project expanded to include support for 72-pin NES cartridges as well as the 60-pin Pegasus ones, and the ability to play both PAL and NTSC games. For this dual-system support he had to include both sets of processor and graphics chip variants, along with logic to switch between them. He goes into some detail on the tribulations of achieving this switch.

The result is a very impressive and well-executed piece of work. The PAL games have a letterbox effect with black bars at top and bottom of the screen, while the NTSC games have slightly washed-out colours. But if you were a gamer of the day you’ll see these as simply part of the genuine experience.

He’s posted a descriptive video which we’ve embedded below the break, but with non-English commentary. It is however still worth watching even without understanding the audio, for its view of the completed board and gameplay.

Continue reading “One Home Made NES To Rule Them All” →

From CRT TV To All-In-One Console

October 13, 2016 by Jenny List 8 Comments

When the Raspberry Pi first appeared there was some excitement among Raspberry Jam attendees at the prospect of a computer with a video output on a board small enough to be concealed inside a TV. But while the idea is a good one the prospect of poking around among the high voltages of an older CRT model has meant that surprisingly few such ideas turned into reality.

One person who made the idea into a reality was [Jon], who took a [Dora] The Explorer branded CRT/DVD combo in a fetching shade of red and turned it into an all-in-one retro console gaming system with an embedded Raspberry Pi.

This is however not merely a Pi stuffed inside the rear casing with a few holes for cables, instead he took away the substantial part of the DVD mechanism and mounted his Pi safely in a plastic box. Some USB extension cables bring all four USB sockets to the front panel through the DVD slot with a bit of Sugru to hold them in place. An HDMI panel-mount extension goes to the TV’s rear connector panel, as does a power switch for the Pi which is wired to a USB charger mounted on a trailing mains socket inside the case. The composite video from the Pi is wired to the TV’s AV in video socket.

We don’t blame [Jon] for not looking at the TV’s power rails to find power for his Pi, though a TV of this recent age would have safely mains-isolated rails that’s still a task fraught with hazards. The resulting unit is a high quality retro console, and as a final touch he’s given it a Nintendo logo and some storage for his gamepads on the rear.

We’ve had a few CRTs with integrated computers before here at Hackaday, but not all have been as they seemed. This Pi for instance sat in a vintage Singer TV, but the CRT was replaced with a modern LCD. Our favourite though it this Chromecast driving a 1978 GE model.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Dodo 6502 Game System

September 22, 2016 by Jenny List 13 Comments

If you are a gamer of A Certain Age, it’s probable that you retain a soft spot for 8-bit computers and consoles of your youth. For a time when addictive gameplay came through the most minimal of graphics, and when gaming audio was the harshest of square waves rather than immersive soundscapes.

Does the previous paragraph sound familiar? Then we may just have the device for you. The Dodo is a handheld console that harks back to that era with a 6502 processor and a 128×64 pixel OLED screen. Games are loaded from plug-in EEPROM cartridges, and sounds are suitably period-digital square wave tones. It’s the brainchild of [Peter Noyes], and he says he will consider it complete when it sports a game fun enough to entertain his 4-year-old.

The prototype Dodo is a handheld form-factor made from two stacked PCBs. The upper one has the display and buttons while the lower has the classic 6502 and associated chipset in through-hole DIP format. A Game Boy Micro it ain’t, but miniaturization is not the name of the game with these consoles. Best of all though, all the console’s resources are available in a GitHub repository, so you can all have a play too.

The 6502 has featured in a huge number of projects here on Hackaday over the years. Now it’s turned up in the Hackaday Prize.