Well Documented Code Helps Revive Decades-Old Commodore Project

June 7, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 15 Comments

In the 1980s, [Mike] was working on his own RPG for the Commodore 64, inspired by dungeon crawlers of the era like Ultima IV and Telengard, both some of his favorites. The mechanics and gameplay were fairly revolutionary for the time, and [Mike] wanted to develop some of these ideas, especially the idea of line-of-sight, even further with his own game. But an illness, a stint in the military, and the rest of life since the 80s got in the way of finishing this project. This always nagged at him, so he finally dug out his decades-old project, dusted out his old Commodore and other antique equipment, and is hoping to finish it by 2024.

Luckily [Mike’s] younger self went to some extremes documenting the project, starting with a map he created which was inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. There are printed notes from a Commodore 64 printer, including all of the assembly instructions, augmented with his handwritten notes to explain how everything worked. He also has handwritten notes, including character set plans, disk sector use plans, menus, player commands, character stats, and equipment, all saved on paper. The early code was written using a machine language monitor since [Mike] didn’t know about the existence of assemblers at the time. Eventually, he discovered them and attempted to rebuild the code on a Commodore 128 and then an Amiga, but never got everything working together. There is some working code still on a floppy disk, but a lot of it doesn’t work together either.

While not quite finished yet, [Mike] has a well-thought-out plan for completing the build, involving aggregating all of the commented source code and doing quarterly sprints from here on out to attempt to get the project finished. We’re all excited to see how this project fares in the future. Beyond the huge scope of this pet project, we’d also suggest that this is an excellent example of thoroughly commenting one’s code to avoid having to solve mysteries or reinvent wheels when revisiting projects months (or decades) later. After all, self-documenting code doesn’t exist.

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Hackaday Prize 2023: Scratch Made 8-Bit Educational Computer

May 29, 2023 by Joseph Long 6 Comments

To demonstrate the functionality of an 8-bit computer processor at a very basic level, [Mazen Gomaa] assembled a Homemade 8-Bit Educational Computer using common CMOS logic chips, a handful of prototyping boards, and an impressive number of carefully connected wires. [Mazen] was inspired by Ben Eater’s 8-bit TTL Breadboard Computer but opted to solder the chips and other components onto proto boards instead of using solderless breadboards.

The 8-Bit computer is based on the Simple-As-Possible (SAP) computer architecture described in the book “Digital Computer Electronics” by [Paul Malvino] and [Jerald Brown]. These useful educational examples demonstrate data, computer logic, and even programming in the context of basic electronic components. Tinkering with such simple computers provides a real “zeros and ones” exposure to computation.

[Mazen] added some additional features and functionality to his computer, including an instruction keypad, an address keypad, a dot matrix memory data viewer, a Schottky diode matrix ROM, and a boot loader that initializes the RAM with data stored in ROM. With clock speeds up to 100 Hz, the computer consumes around 300-500 mA of current.

Future plans include expanding the memory and instruction set from the present 128-bit (8×16) RAM, 64-bit (8×8) ROM, and a set of ten instructions. Already, this project is a great addition to an ever-growing catalog of homemade solderless breadboard computers, LCD snake games, and VGA video cards.

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Low-Cost RF Power Sensor Gets All The Details Right

April 25, 2023 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

Dirty little secret time: although amateur radio operators talk a good game about relishing the technical challenge of building their own radio equipment, what’s really behind all the DIY gear is the fact that the really good stuff is just too expensive to buy.

A case in point is this super-low-cost RF power sensor that [Tech Minds (M0DQW)] recently built. It’s based on a design by [DL5NEG] that uses a single Schottky diode and a handful of passive components. The design is simple, but as with all things RF, details count. Chief among these details is the physical layout of the PCB, which features a stripline of precise dimensions to keep the input impedance at the expected 50 ohms. Also important are the number and locations of the vias that stitch the ground planes together on the double-sided PCB.

While [Tech Minds]’ first pass at the sensor hewed closely to the original design and used a homebrew PCB, the sensor seemed like a great candidate for translating to a commercial PCB. This version proved to be just as effective as the original, with the voltage output lining up nicely with the original calibration curves generated by [DL5NEG]. The addition of a nice extruded aluminum case and an N-type RF input made for a very professional-looking tool, not to mention a useful one.

[Tech Minds] is lucky enough to live within view of QO-100, ham radio’s first geosynchronous satellite, so this sensor will be teamed up with an ADC and a Raspberry Pi to create a wattmeter with a graphical display for his 2.4-GHz satellite operations.

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DIY Game Boy Games Make The Perfect Christmas Gift

January 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Sometimes, the best gift is the one you make yourself. [Pigeonaut] decided to whip up a few Game Boy games of their very own creation to gift to the special people in their life.

The games were crafted using a platform called GB Studio. It’s a tool that allows the drag-and-drop creation of games for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color handhelds. It’s capable of creating ROM files to run in an emulator, within a web page, or they can be flashed to a cartridge and played on real Nintendo hardware.

For the full effect, [Pigeonaut] went with the latter method. Four games were created: Phantom Shock, Climbing Mount Crymore, Cozy Cat Cafe, and A Tiny Hike. Each was flashed onto a real cart and given a high-quality label to make a lovely tangible gift. Upon gifting, [Pigeonaut]’s friends and partner were able to play their way through their personalized titles on a GameCube running the Game Boy Player accessory.

It’s hard to imagine a more touching gift than a personal game crafted from the ground up. Getting to play it on a real Nintendo is even better, and we’ve seen hardware that can achieve that before. Try out the games in your web browser via the links above, or send us in your own cool homebrew hacks to the Tipsline!

A Primer For The Homebrew Game Boy Advance Scene

August 29, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

As video game systems pass into antiquity, some of them turn out to make excellent platforms for homebrew gaming. Not only does modern technology make it easier to interact with systems that are now comparatively underpowered and simpler, but the documentation available for older systems is often readily available as well, giving the community lots of options for exploration and creativity. The Game Boy Advance is becoming a popular platform for these sorts of independent game development, and this video shows exactly how you can get started too.

This tutorial starts with some explanation of how the GBA works. It offered developers several modes for the display, so this is the first choice a programmer must make when designing the game. From there it has a brief explanation of how to compile programs for the GBA and execute them, then it dives into actually writing the games themselves. There are a few examples that [3DSage] demonstrates here including examples for checking the operation of the code and hardware, some simple games, and also a detailed explanation the framebuffers and other hardware and software available when developing games for this console.

While the video is only 10 minutes long, we recommend watching it at three-quarters or half speed. It’s incredibly information-dense and anyone following along will likely need to pause several times. That being said, it’s an excellent primer for developing games for this platform and in general, especially since emulators are readily available so the original hardware isn’t needed. If you’d like to build something from an even more bygone era than the early 2000s, though, take a look at this tutorial for developing games on arcade cabinets.

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Raspberry Pi Pico “Modchip” Unlocks The GameCube

July 5, 2022 by Tom Nardi 29 Comments

In terms of units sold, it’s no secret that the GameCube was one of Nintendo’s poorest performing home consoles. You could argue increased competition meant sales of the quirky little machine were destined to fall short of the system’s legendary predecessors, but that didn’t keep the Wii from outselling it by a factor of five a few years later. Still, enough incredible games were released for the GameCube that the system still enjoys a considerable fanbase.

Now, with the release of PicoBoot by [webhdx], we suspect the GameCube is about to gain a whole new generation of fans. With just a Raspberry Pi Pico, some jumper wires, and a widely available third-party SD card adapter, this open source project bypasses the console’s original BIOS so it can boot directly into whatever homebrew application the user selects. With how cheap and easy to perform this modification is, we wouldn’t be surprised if it kicked off something of a renaissance for GameCube homebrew development.

In the video after the break, [Tito] of Macho Nacho Productions provides a rundown of this new project, including a fantastic step-by-step installation guide that covers everything from soldering the jumper wires to the console’s motherboard to getting the firmware installed on the Pico. He then demonstrates booting the console into various community developed front-ends and tools, showing just how versatile the modification is. While some will see this as little more than an easier way to run bootleg games, we can’t help but be excited about what the future holds now that getting your own code to run on the system is so easy.

Alright, maybe it’s not so easy. To solder on the five wires that will eventually snake their way to the GPIO pins of the Pi Pico, you’ll need to strip the console all the way down to the main board. That wouldn’t be too bad itself, but unfortunately to reach two of the connections you’ll need to remove the system’s massive heatsink — which means you’ll need to clean up the old sticky thermal pads and apply new ones if you don’t want your GameCube to turn into a GameCrisp. It’s nothing that would scare off the average Hackaday reader, but it might give pause to those less handy with an iron.

The release of PicoBoot comes hot on the heels of the revelation that the Raspberry Pi Pico can be used not only as an N64 flash cart but as a supercharged PlayStation Memory Card. These projects would all be significantly improved with a custom RP2040 board, and no doubt that’s the direction they’ll eventually head, but it’s hard not to be impressed by what the low-cost microcontroller development board is capable of in its native form. Especially now that it comes in WiFi flavor.

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Nintendo Switch Runs Vita Software With Vita2hos

March 6, 2022 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

Good news for fans of PlayStation Vita — a new project from [Sergi “xerpi” Granell] allows users to run software written for Sony’s erstwhile handheld system on Nintendo’s latest money printing machine, the Switch. To be clear, there’s a very long road ahead before the vita2hos project is able to run commercial games (if ever). But it’s already able to run simple CPU-rendered Vita homebrew binaries on the Switch, demonstrating the concept is sound.

Running a Vita CHIP-8 emulator on the Switch. Credit: Modern Vintage Gamer

On a technical level, vita2hos is not unlike WINE, which enables POSIX-compliant operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS, and BSD to run Windows programs so long as they use the same processor architecture. Since the Switch’s ARM v8 processor is capable of executing code compiled for the Vita’s ARM v7 while running in 32-bit compatibility mode, there’s no emulation necessary. The project simply needs to provide the running program with work-alike routines fast enough, and nobody is the wiser. Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done.

According to the project page, the big hurdle right now is 3D graphics support. As you could imagine, many Vita games would have been pushing the system’s graphical hardware to the limit, making it exceptionally difficult to catch all the little edge cases that will undoubtedly come up when and if the project expands to support commercial titles. But for homebrew Vita games and utilities that may not even utilize the system’s 3D hardware, adding compatibility will be much easier. For instance, it’s already able to run [xerpi]’s own CHIP-8 emulator.

[xerpi] provides instructions on how to install vita2hos and the Vita executable to be tested onto an already hacked Nintendo Switch should you want to give it a shot. But unless you’ve got experience developing for the Vita or Switch and are willing to lend a hand, you might want to sit this one out until things mature a bit.

Thanks to [NeoTechni] for the tip.