C64 Visual Debugger

August 29, 2009 by James Munns 12 Comments

c64ICU

Root Labs wrote about ICU64, a Commodore 64 emulator with a couple unusual features. The most special of these is the ability to show the entire working RAM of the system. Each RAM address lights up when accessed. The user can also zoom in or change the values at each address if they want. This sounds complicated, but the demo videos demonstrate the power of these abilities. This would also serve as a great primer on lower-level code’s memory management. Unfortunately [mathfigure], the author of ICU64, hasn’t released this out to the public yet, but should be released soon.

ICU64 has been released!

[thanks to mathfigure for following up with this]

Videos after the jump.

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USB Reader For SNES Game Carts

June 19, 2009 by Gerrit Coetzee 82 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwq6vRM8U7k]

Reader, [Matthias_H], sent in a video about his USB adapter for SNES game carts. All you have to do is plug in the SNES game cartridge and USB cable, then a ROM file of the game shows up as an external storage device on your computer. After that, you can play the ROM with your choice of emulator. We emailed [Matthias] asking for more information, and he quickly replied with a very nice writeup about the hack that is pasted below.

Update: [Matthias] launched a site for the “snega2usb” with updates on the development of the board and a FAQ.

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Hackit: Modern Arcade Cabinets?

August 20, 2008 by Eliot 39 Comments

We’ve been contemplating getting into MAME arcade cabinet building. It was sparked by someone dropping off a Street Fighter II machine at our office. Many people have been seeking to build the perfect arcade cabinet clone, but looking over this old dusty cabinet we realized that retro isn’t really what we want. We want an arcade cabinet with a modern aesthetic.

Retro Thing recently posted [Martijn Koch]’s Retro Space. The cabinet takes design cues from old cabinets, but uses modern technology like a 24″ LCD. It does feature classic controls though. Wandering through arcades today, most of the machines appear to be DDR style or vehicle sims. No one is building modern gaming machines.

We’re still in the planning stages of this build. We’d definitely use classic controls and combine it with an LCD 24″ or larger. The brain would probably be a Playstation 3. We could run any emulator we want on the Linux side and also play modern PS3 games. How it will look is still up in the air. We’re leaning towards building a standup 4 player brawler machine for playing games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men, and The Simpsons.

Have any of you built a MAME machine before? How would you build an arcade machine with a modern aesthetic?