gaming

127 Articles

Playdate Handheld Turned Typewriter

October 18, 2022 by 6 Comments

The Playdate is an interesting gaming system. It’s a handheld, has a black and white screen, and superficially reminds us a little bit of the original Game Boy, right down to the button layout. But the fact that it has a second controller that pops out of the side, that this controller is a crank, and that the whole system was made by the same people that made Untitled Goose Game, makes us quite intrigued. Apparently it has made an impact on others, too, because this project turns the gaming system into a typewriter.

The Playdate doesn’t have native support for USB accessories unless it’s plugged into this custom 3D printed dock. Inside of the dock is a Teensy 4.1 which handles some translation between the keyboard and the console. Once the dock is taken care of the text editor needs to be side-loaded to the device as well. The word processor has the ability to move the cursor around, insert and delete text, and the project’s creator, [t0mg], plans to add more features in future versions like support for multiple files, changing the font, and a few other things as well.

For anyone interested in recreating this project, all of the printable files, the text editor, and the schematics are all available in the GitHub repo. It’s an impressive project for a less well-known console that we haven’t seen many other hacks for, unless you count this one-off Arduboy project which took some major inspiration from the Playdate’s crank controller.

The NES Gets Its Own OS

September 28, 2022 by 20 Comments

Until recently, most video game systems didn’t need their own operating systems in order to play games. Especially in the cartridge era — the games themselves simply ran directly on the hardware and didn’t require the middleman of an operating system for any of the functionality of the consoles. There were exceptions for computers that doubled as home computers such as the Commodore, but systems like the NES never had their own dedicated OS. At least, until [Inkbox] designed and built the NES-OS.

The operating system does not have any command line, instead going directly for a graphical user interface. There are two programs that make up the operating system. The first is a settings application which allows the user to make various changes to the appearance and behavior of the OS, and the second is a word processor with support for the Japanese “Family Keyboard” accessory. The memory on the NES is limited, and since the OS loads entirely into RAM there’s only enough leftover space for eight total files. Those files themselves are limited to 832 bytes, which is one screen’s worth of text without scrolling.

While it might seem limited to those of us living in the modern era, the OS makes nearly complete use of the available processing power and memory of this 1980s system that was best known for Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. It’s an impressive build for such a small package, and really dives into a lot of the hardware and limitations when building software for these systems. If you need more functionality than that, we’d recommend installing Linux on the NES Classic instead.

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Design Cities In A Snap With Buildify

July 21, 2022 by 7 Comments

Designing 3D environments is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. A week ago, if you decided to design an entire city in Blender, say for a game or animation, you probably would have downloaded some asset pack full of building shapes and textures and painstakingly placed them over the course of days, modifying the models and making new ones as needed. Now, you would just need to download Buildify, feed it an asset pack, and watch the magic happen.

Buildify, made by [Pavel Oliva], is one of the most impressive bits of Blender content we’ve seen in a long time. It lets you generate entire cities by drawing the outlines of buildings. You can grab walls and resize individual structures, and the walls, windows, doors, textures, and everything else will automatically rearrange as needed. You can even select a region on Open Street Maps and watch as Buildify recreates the area in Blender using your chosen asset pack (maybe a KiCad PCB design could be used as the source material too?). It’s really something incredible to see, and you’ve just got to watch the video below to understand just how useful this tool can be.

The pay-what-you-want .blend file that you can grab off of [Pavel]’s website doesn’t include all the beautiful assets you can see in the video, but instead generates simple grey block buildings. He made one of the packs used in the video, and will be releasing it online for free soon. In the meantime, he links to other ones you can buy, or you can get really ambitious and create your own. We know it won’t be long until we’re seeing animations and games with Buildify-generated cities.

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Even DOOM Can Now Run DOOM!

July 12, 2022 by 30 Comments

For years now, the standard test of any newly hacked piece of hardware has been this: can it run DOOM? id Software’s 1993 classic first-person shooter has appeared on everything, but here’s one from [kgsws] that’s a bit special. It’s DOOM, running inside DOOM itself.

So how has this feat been achieved? There’s a code execution exploit inside the original DOS DOOM II executable, and that has been used to run the more modern Chocolate Doom within the original. It appears as an in-game texture, giving an odd effect as if it’s being watched in a cinema.

The video below the break shows the game-in-game in action, but the real value lies in its in-depth description of the exploit, that takes us through some of the inner workings of the game and ably explains what’s going on. It finishes up with a specially made cinema WAD in which to play DOOM-in-DOOM, and even Hexen-in-DOOM. Pick up your trusty chainsaw, it’s going to be a long night.

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Putting A Little More Juice In Your Emulation Station

June 22, 2022 by 9 Comments

After you’ve built a snazzy Raspberry Pi-powered retro gaming console, you might be wondering if you could have just a wee bit more power and run some of those other games you might remember, such as Xbox, Wii, or PS3. Perhaps in the future, a later revision of an RPi could handle it but currently, to emulate the 6th/7th generation of consoles, you need something a little beefier. Luckily, [Zac] got his hands on an old gaming laptop and turned it into his own game console.

The first step was to take the laptop apart and discard the parts not needed. [Zac] stripped away the battery, Bluray drive, and spinning hard disk. That left him with a much smaller PCB that could fit into a small case. The power button was integrated into the keyboard but came into the motherboard by the flat cable keyboard connection. So by bridging a few pins, he could power up the laptop. Next, he upgraded the RAM, wifi card, an NVMe drive, and redid all the thermal paste and putty to try and keep things cool while overclocking the GPU.

The case for the machine heavily used his CNC as it was walnut with a mid-section made of plywood. The top has a gorgeous cast acrylic window to see inside. The part the [Zac] was dreading with the fine pitch soldering. Ultimately he got both wires connected with good connections and no bridging. Because it’s just a PC at its heart, almost every game is on the table. Emulation, some more moderate PC games, streaming from his office PC, and cloud gaming services allow him to access most games made. We love the concept and the idea.

We love the aesthetic of the build but if you prefer to keep your consoles looking a little more faithful, why not put your mini PC inside of an actual N64 case? Video after the break.

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English Words In French Gaming? Non Merci!

June 1, 2022 by 111 Comments

Are you a gamer? If you’re French, it seems that you shouldn’t be using so much English in pursuit of your goals.

It’s a feature of an active language, that it will readily assimilate words from others. Pizza, karaoke, vuvuzela, parka, gateau, schadenfreude, they have all played their part in bringing a little je ne sais quoi into our everyday speech. This happens as a natural process as whatever the word is describing becomes popular, and sometimes these new words cause a backlash from those who see themselves as the language’s defenders.

Often this is a fringe activity such as the British politician who made a fool of himself in a radio interview by insisting on the now-archaic Wade-Giles “Peking” rather than the vastly more common Pinyin “Beijing”, but for some tongues it’s no laughing matter. Nowhere is this more the case than in the Francophone world, in which the Academie Francaise and the French and Quebecquois governments see themselves as very much the official guardians of French. And now it seems that the French ministry of culture have turned their eyes upon gamers.

It’s nothing new for words associated with technology to fall under this scrutiny, a quarter century ago in the CD-ROM business it was de rigeur for localized discs to talk about le logicel, l’ordinateur, and telecharger instead of program, computer, and download. The talk of the industry was that Sony refused to do this for PlayStation consoles sold in Quebec during the 1990s, and thus all their sales in the province had to be under-the-counter. But there’s a sense from reading the reports that this intervention is a little clumsy; while it’s easy to say logicel we’re not so sure that jeu video de competition  or video game competition for e-sports and joueur-animateur en direct or live player-animator for streamer aren’t just too much of a mouthful for easy adoption. For the first one, we can’t help remembering that sport is also an everyday French word, so couldn’t they have come up with something less clumsy such as reseau-sports or network-sports?

Here at Hackaday more than one of us are unrepentant Francophiles, so the evolution of French words in our field is of interest to us. Habitez-vous en France ou Quebec? Donnez-nous votres idees dans les commentaires! (mais en Anglais s’il vous plait pour les Americains, excusez-nous)

Header image: Christopher Macsurak, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Gaming Mouse Becomes Digital Camera

May 16, 2022 by 15 Comments

Ever since the world decided to transition from mechanical ball mice to optical mice, we have been blessed with computer pointing devices that don’t need regular cleaning and have much better performance than their ancestors. They do this by using what is essentially a tiny digital camera to monitor changes in motion. As we’ve seen before, it is possible to convert this mechanism into an actual camera, but until now we haven’t seen something like this on a high-performance mouse designed for FPS gaming.

For this project [Ankit] is disassembling the Logitech G402, a popular gaming mouse with up to 4000 dpi. Normally this is processed internally in the mouse to translate movement into cursor motion, but this mouse conveniently has a familiar STM32 processor with an SPI interface already broken out on the PCB that could be quickly connected to in order to gather image data. [Ankit] created a custom USB vendor-specific endpoint and wrote a Linux kernel module to parse the data into a custom GUI program that can display the image captured by the mouse sensor on-screen.

It’s probably best to not attempt this project if you plan to re-use the mouse, as the custom firmware appears to render the mouse useless as an actual mouse. But as a proof-of-concept project this high-performance mouse does work fairly well as a camera, albeit with a very low resolution by modern digital camera standards. It is much improved on older mouse-camera builds we’ve seen, though, thanks to the high performance sensors in gaming mice.