games

74 Articles

Lunar Lander Remade

July 16, 2009 by 15 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnKzeHPgWy8]

For those that are lucky enough to remember it, Lunar Lander was a fantastic game. Though it had simple vector graphics and highly repetitive game play, it kept us captivated. We probably lost entire weeks of our lives competing with friends to be the best. Well, now we can relive that experience with a physical version of the game. [Lain] built this fantastic arcade style game to replicate Lunar Lander’s game play exactly. The style of the project is fantastic with giant analog meters and dials giving real time feedback.  You even get a prize if you complete all 3 levels. You can get plenty of build details by going through his blog. Maybe he should hook up with the folks that built the Apollo landing computer replica to build the ultimate simulator.

[thanks Mike]

Accelerometer Controlled Pong

September 23, 2008 by 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYVgXYtxk4E]

[Perry’s] awesome AcceLED Pong project gives new life to a classic game by adding acceleration-based control. The pong paddles are moved by tilting the circuit left or right. Motion is measured by an ADXL203 dual axis accelerometer, and an ATMEGA32 microcontroller converts acceleration into ball and paddle movement. The game display is a three-color SparkFun 8×8 LED matrix with serial interface.

[Perry] also used a similar setup to make a USB LED spectrum analyzer fed by the Linux XMMS media player.

OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator Teardown

September 18, 2008 by 16 Comments

m8ta fun did an extensive teardown of OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator (NIA). OCZ’s computer/mind interface is actually a fairly straight forward design. An analog front-end cleans and amplifies the ‘neural’ signal with a few op-amps before feeding it to a 24 bit analog to digital converter (ADC). A USB enabled PIC microcontroller reads the 24bit parallel ADC output through a common 7400 series parallel to serial adapter IC. The device has an ICSP programing header (top right), though it’s not yet clear if the PIC can be read or written.

[Thanks, joeyo]

USB NES Controller Plus

July 19, 2008 by 6 Comments


USB NES controllers are old school these days, but [Jay] put together a nice new take on the project. He shoehorned a USB interface adapter, USB hub and a USB memory stick to store his collection of NES roms and emulators right on the controller. He even dug up a black USB cable to keep the original look of the controller. Now he can just plug in and load his game selection directly from the controller.

Cheap ARM Color LCD Platform

July 18, 2008 by 6 Comments


Today, [sprite_tm] let us in on one of his pet projects. This is an inexpensive portable game platform runs about $50 and happens to use an ARM CPU and a 320×240 color LCD. Because it’s so cheap, he’s been working on reverse engineering the thing and there’s already a proof of concept homebrew version of Pong out for it.
Update: Yeah, yeah – title’s fixed.

XBox Controller USB Labotomy

July 17, 2008 by 10 Comments


[sprite_tm]’s back with one of his excellent Atmel projects. This time he decided to turn an original XBox controller (cause he likes ’em) into a standard USB HID device. He gutted the custom USB chip that Microsoft installed and replaced it with an Atmel ATMega88. The ATMega required a few changes to the board, but nothing too off the wall.