game

173 Articles

String Racing Robots Are Here !

January 12, 2016 by 24 Comments

This could be the start of a new thing. [HarpDude] showed off his String Car Racers over on the Adafruit forum. It’s like a small model cable car on caffeine. String up enough of them and go head to head racing with others.

A motor with a small pulley runs over a length of string stretched between 2 posts. Below the pulley, acting as a counterweight balance, is the rest of the racer. A Trinket board, motor driver, 9V battery and a pair of long lever micro switches to detect end of travel. The switches also help reverse the motor. A piece of galvanized wire acts as a guide preventing the String Car from jumping off the string. And discovering the benefits of a micro-controller design, as against discrete TTL/CMOS, old timer [HarpDude] added two operational modes via software. “Pong”, where the String Car keeps going back and forth over the string until it stops of (battery) exhaustion. The other mode is “Boomerang” – a single return trip back and forth.

We are guessing the next upgrade would be to add some kind of radio on the car (ESP8266 perhaps) and build an app to control the String Car. That’s when gaming could become fun as it opens up possibilities. One way to improve performance would be to add two “idler” pulleys in line with the main drive pulley, and then snake the string through the three of them. Now you know what to do with all of those old motors you’ve scavenged from tape drives, CD drives and printers. Let the Games begin!

Thanks [Mike Stone] for tipping us off on this.

Printing Objects Directly From Fallout 4

December 20, 2015 by 40 Comments

Fallout 4 was released about a month ago, and although we don’t have a ‘took an arrow to the knee’ meme like Bethesda’s last game, there are ample opportunities for cosplay and printing out deathclaws and mirelurks on a 3D printer. How do you turn files hidden away in a game’s folders into a real, printed object? It’s actually pretty easy and [Angus] is here to tell you how.

The files for Fallout enemies and items can be readily accessed with the Bethesda Archive Extractor, although this won’t give you files that a 3D printer can understand. You’ll get a .NIF file, and NifSkope can convert the files found in the Fallout archives to an .OBJ file any 3D modeling program can understand. The next step from there is taking the .OBJ file into Meshmixer and fixing everything with Netfabb. After that, it’s off to the printer.

[Angus] printed his model of a Deathclaw in ABS in multiple parts, gluing them together with a little bit of acetone. This didn’t go exactly as planned; there were some contaminants in the ABS that turned into a white film on the black ABS. This was ultimately fixed with XTC-3D, the 3D print coating everyone is experimenting with.

The finished product is a solid yellow but completely smooth 3D model of one of the toughest enemies in Fallout 4. The only thing left to do is paint the model. The best way to proceed at this point is probably doing what model builders have been doing for decades – an airbrush, and hundreds of tiny bottles of paint. [Angus] is opening up his YouTube comments for suggestions, and if you have a better idea he’s looking for some help.
Continue reading “Printing Objects Directly From Fallout 4” →

Robot Cheats At Rock Paper Scissors

October 6, 2015 by 15 Comments

It is hard enough to beat computers at games like chess. Now robotics engineers at the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory in Japan have created a janken robot that wins every time (if you didn’t know, janken is the Japanese name for rock-paper-scissors). How can it win every time? Easy. It cheats.

The janken robot evolved through three different versions. In the first version, the robotic hand would note the human player’s hand with a high-speed camera and then move the hand to a winning counter play with about a 20 millisecond delay. In the second version, the delay was greatly reduced.

However, in the third version, the robot uses a scanning technique to capture an entire field of view and determines what play the human is making. Again, a winning counter play is instantly produced by the robotic hand.

Continue reading “Robot Cheats At Rock Paper Scissors” →

Becoming A Zombie With The Hackable Electronic Badge

September 25, 2015 by 10 Comments

Last week, Parallax released an open hackable electronic badge that will eventually be used at dozens of conferences. It’s a great idea that allows badge hacks developed during one conference to be used at a later conference.

[Mark] was at the Hackable Electronics Badge premier at the 2015 Open Hardware Summit last weekend, and he just finished up the first interactive hack for this badge. It’s the zombie apocalypse in badge form, pitting humans and zombies against each other at your next con.

The zombie survival game works with the IR transmitter and receiver on the badge normally used to exchange contact information. Upon receiving the badge, the user chooses to be either a zombie or survivor. Pressing the resistive buttons attacks, heals, or infects others over IR. The game is your standard zombie apocalypse affair: zombies infect survivors, survivors attack zombies and heal the infected, and the infected turn into zombies.

Yes, a zombie apocalypse is a simple game for a wearable with IR communications, but for the Hackable Electronics Badge, it’s a great development. There will eventually be tens of thousands of these badges floating around at cons, and having this game available on day-one of a conference will make for a lot of fun.

DEF CON: Abusing Scripts In Multiplayer Games

August 8, 2015 by 11 Comments

Everyone has at least a few games on their computer, and I would assume most of the Hackaday readership would be among the enlightened PC gamer bretheren. At this year’s DEF CON, [Tamas Szakaly] gave a talk about the data these games leak to the Internet, the data they accept from the Internet, and what you can do with that data.

[Tamas]’ talk was entirely about scripting games, like the many games that are scriptable in Lua, or Valve’s Squirrel. Developers have thought about this before and have implemented sandboxes and many anti-cheat mechanisms. However, because these sandboxes are poorly implemented, it’s easy to get outside the game and do some real damage.

[Tamas]’ first target was Crysis 2 and the CryEngine3. This game uses a Lua scripting engine and has no sandbox whatsoever. That means [Tamas] can call os.execute, and from there the entire game is over. Or it’s just begun. Either way you look at it, it’s pretty bad.

CryTek notwithstanding, [Tamas] can also use games with Lua scripting that have a real sandbox. DOTA2 has a leaky sandbox and can be used to call OS I/O routines and execute base 64 encoded executables right over the main executable.

The most impressive example of script abuse in various multiplayer games is from Garry’s Mod. This game has custom implementation of dangerous functions, restricted file IO, and a proper Lua sandbox. This was a wise decision from the developers, but the library is huge. If you create a map or mode used on a server, you can have a full HTTP proxy to the gamer’s home network. During the talk, [Tamas] used this exploit to display an image from a webcam on a Garry’s Mod server. It was on the podium right next him, but this could have been done on a server on the other side of the planet.

Continue reading “DEF CON: Abusing Scripts In Multiplayer Games” →

DDR-ing A Simon Game With A Raspberry Pi

July 24, 2015 by 8 Comments

Since 1998 we’ve been privileged to partake in an arcade game known as Dance Dance Revolution, but before that, way back in the 70’s, was the Simon game. It’s essentially a memory game that asks the player to remember a series of lights and sounds. [Uberdam] decided to get the best of both worlds and mixed the two together creating this giant foot controlled Simon game. (English translation.)

The wood platform that serves as the base of the project was fitted with four capacitive sensors, each one representing a “color” on the Simon game. When a player stomps on a color, a capacitive sensor sends a signal to a relay which in turn notifies the Raspberry Pi brain of the input. The Pi also takes care of showing the player the sequence of colored squares that must be stepped on, and keeps track of a player’s progress on a projector.

This is a pretty good way of showing how a small, tiny computer like the Raspberry Pi can have applications in niche environments while also being a pretty fun game. We all remember Simon as being frustrating, and we can only imagine how jumping around on a wooden box would make it even more exciting. Now, who can build a robot that can beat this version of Simon?

Continue reading “DDR-ing A Simon Game With A Raspberry Pi” →

Game And Watch

Give In To Nostalgia With A Retro Game And Watch

June 15, 2015 by 15 Comments

One of the earliest Nintendo products to gain popularity was the Game and Watch product line. Produced by Nintendo between 1980 and 1991, they are a source of nostalgia for many an 80s or 90s kid. These were those electronic handheld games that had pre-drawn monochrome images that would light up to make very basic animations. [Andrew] loved his old “Vermin” game as a kid, but eventually he sold it off. Wanting to re-live those childhood memories, he decided to build his own Game and Watch emulator.

The heart of [Andrew’s] build is a PIC18F4550 USB demo board he found on eBay. The board allows you to upload HEX files directly via USB using some simple front end software. [Andrew] wrote the code for his game in C using MPLAB. His device uses a Nokia 5110 LCD screen and is powered from a small lithium ion battery.

For the housing, [Andrew] started from another old handheld game that was about the right size. He gutted all of the old parts and stuck the new ones in their place. He also gave the housing a sort of brushed metal look using spray paint. The end result is a pretty good approximation of the original thing as evidenced by the video below. Continue reading “Give In To Nostalgia With A Retro Game And Watch” →