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373 Articles

Drum Machina Go! As A New Music Tool For The Game Boy

October 1, 2026 by 7 Comments

The Nintendo Game Boy is quite possibly the most popular console in the international chiptune community. You might have seen musicians cranking out tunes with LSDJ or Nanoloop, but now there’s a new option for writing bangers on the DMG. It’s Drum Machina Go!, put together by [audiowanderer].

The original Game Boy has a four-bit audio engine with two pulse channels, one waveform channel, and a noise channel. To that end, DMGo! gives you those four channels to play with, each with a 16-step sequencer. There’s also an FX section, ADSR controls, and various filtering options to make your sound juicier, richer, or grainier, depending on your taste.

There are also helpful sync options via the link port, such as for use with other Game Boys, or you can use PULSE OUT sync to hook up to your Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators or KORG Volcas if you have them. There are also fun features like the MANGLING FX which lets you decay and destroy your musical creations live by playing with the D-pad and buttons.

If you’re eager to try a new way to compose on the Game Boy, you can throw it on a flash cart or in an emulator and start tinkering away.  We’ve featured other fun Game Boy music hacks before, too, like this nifty project that turns it into a MIDI sequencer.

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An Enhanced Game Boy Advance

September 17, 2026 by 14 Comments

[Bucket Mouse] has long been a fan of the various iterations of the Nintendo Game Boy. Now, he’s turned his eye to the Game Boy Advance, building an enhanced version for the console’s 25th anniversary.

There are plenty of ways to mod an existing GBA to be better than the original, but this build recreates the console from the ground up. It’s basically a brand new motherboard that replaces the original entirely, requiring only the CPU and RAM to be harvested from the original board.

It’s perfect for when you find a badly-damaged handheld that needs heavy repair, because every other part on the board can be purchased new. You can buy a nice shiny screen kit online, and even upgrade to LiPo power if so desired. The new motherboard also eliminates sound issues that are common when upgrading the screen in a classic GBA, and there’s stereo audio available on the headphone jack as standard. Battery life is also improved compared to the original.

If you’ve got a haggard old GBA in need of repair, or you just want to build the best classic handheld you can, it’s worth taking a look at this build. You might also appreciate previous works from [Bucket Mouse], like his efforts to improve the original Game Boy.

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Troubleshooting Video Delay On The Raspberry Pi

August 13, 2026 by 1 Comment

The Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers are great little devices, and they can do great things with cameras and video. However, there can be a fair bit of latency involved in these tasks depending on the board you’re using and just what you’re doing. You need to have things set up just so to get peak performance. [MattKC] has tangled with this issue in a personal project, and recently had somewhat of a breakthrough.

The issue came up during [MattKC’s] work on cloning the WiiU gamepad. The idea was to receive the video stream from the WiiU console and display it using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. He had some problems with latency, wherein there was a strange 3 frames of latency in the video pipeline that just wouldn’t go away. Even substituting in some dummy frames into the pipeline and ignoring them at output time didn’t work—the latency stuck around. Eventually, [MattKC] realized the delay wasn’t about a certain number of frames—it was about time. About 50 milliseconds, in fact.

Drilling down further revealed that there was a problem in the way frames were being fed into and received from the decoder. The first frame would take about 50 ms to decode, while later frames would take far less—as little as 5ms. However, [MattKC’s] code wasn’t set up to grab frames as soon as they were done, so the lag carried forward. The video explains it in greater detail, and how polling the decoder regularly helped solve the issue. The final result was a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W that could process and display the WiiU video feed as quickly as the original Nintendo WiiU gamepad.

If you dug this, it’s worth going back and checking out where the WiiU gamepad project started, too. Video after the break.

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Functional Jumping Pokéball From An Ancient Pokémon World

August 10, 2026 by 9 Comments

When playing a game about Pocket Monsters, there’s one thing you can’t avoid using no matter what you do, and that’s a pokeball. Whether it’s a new or old game, you can’t avoid it. Many from different generations or spin-off games have their own fun spin, and that’s what [Kiara] wanted to explore with her custom made replication of an older style of ball.

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Graphics Upgrade For Nintendo Entertainment System

June 22, 2026 by 24 Comments

Modern video game consoles rarely have expansion ports, but in the 80s and 90s it was practically guaranteed. With the speed that hardware was advancing it made sense to build in some way to upgrade a system’s capabilities throughout its lifespan. But while this gave us things like the Sega CD and N64 Expansion Pak, many ports ultimately went unused. Given this recent project from [decrazyo], one wonders if unused port on the bottom of the Nintendo Entertainment System could have been used to expand its graphical capabilities.

The basis of this upgrade is the fact that the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) on the NES has four pins that are grounded. These four pins tell the NES to display the background color if the pixel is transparent. Since they’re normally grounded, this means the NES can only display a limited background image, but there’s no reason these pins must be grounded. By using a second PPU configured to output graphics information and wiring it to these four pins on the first PPU, the NES can be given all kinds of new abilities, such as adding parallax effects to backgrounds, rendering more sprites, and showing more colors in the backgrounds.

Of course, the hardware requirements for this will require a donor NES to get the second PPU as well as the necessary memory chip for it, and we don’t recommend tearing apart perfectly good retro consoles for experimentation if it can be avoided. Presumably, you could use this open-source NES hardware alternative instead. But for those with the parts and the gumption, creating a demo or adding graphics features to homebrew games using this second graphics chip is within reach.

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Hackaday Links: June 14, 2026

June 14, 2026 by No comments

Times are tough out there, and many are starting to feel the pressure at the grocery store checkout line or the gas pump. But whenever you start to worry about affording life’s necessities, take comfort in the knowledge that somebody is so flush with cash that on Friday they decided to treat themselves and spend $3 million for a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Although we’re not going to say it necessarily justifies the insane price — a new record for the most ever paid for a video game, incidentally — Heritage Auctions does note in their press release that this is an exceptionally rare version of what’s admittedly one of the most iconic pieces of software ever produced. This is only one of three copies of this particular variant known to exist, which Nintendo apparently distributed to test markets in the United States ahead of the game’s official 1985 release.

In slightly more modern gaming news, Asha Sharma, the new head of Microsoft’s Xbox division, has been making some big swings to try and get Microsoft’s gaming division back on track after years of declining sales. As part of that effort, she recently penned an article detailing some of the challenges the company is facing, which includes some interesting hardware details.

According to the blog post, she claims that in February, the cost of memory and storage components for the Xbox console had doubled compared to the previous year. But those numbers have jumped again, and by the time the holidays roll around, she expects they’ll be paying five times what they did in 2024. That’s bad news for anyone looking to put an Xbox under the tree come Christmas, but even worse news as the company works on the console’s successor. Considering that today’s hardware from Sony and Microsoft can already set you back $700 USD depending on which version you get, it seems like we’re approaching a point where gaming consoles could price themselves out of the market.

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GameCube Bot Records Your Play In A Weird Way

April 23, 2026 by 8 Comments

If you wanted to record yourself playing on a GameCube, you could use a VCR to capture the video output on tape. But there is a more interesting way to do it—which is precisely what [jiinurppa] built GameCube bot for. 

The concept is simple—GameCube bot is a small device that captures controller inputs and records them to an SD card. It can then play them back on command, allowing it to recreate gameplay as it happened the first time right on the console. A Raspberry Pi Pico is the brains of the operation, which is able to intercept signals from a standard GameCube controller. It’s paired with the aforementioned SD storage as well as an ST7735 display for showing status information. The device records in the DTM (Dolphin TAS Movie) format, which can be played back on the device when hooked up to a GameCube console, or in emulators like Dolphin itself.

[jiinurppa] notes that the device isn’t accurate enough to use for tool-assisted speed runs. Most notably, small errors in optical drive reads can lead to desyncs compared to the original machine state that make frame-accurate replays impossible. Still, it’s a neat build that can be useful for capturing game play and later analysis.

We’ve explored the world of Tool Assisted Speedruns before, though this device isn’t directly applicable to that world. Video after the break.

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