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.
Continue reading “Functional Jumping Pokéball From An Ancient Pokémon World”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey isn’t hitting theaters for another month or so, but if you’re already planning your trip to the cineplex, you may want to check out this page on the movie’s website which lets you view the trailer in the six (!) different formats it’s being released in.
We don’t really have an opinion on the big-screen adaptation of the epic tale as a piece of media, but from a technical standpoint, it’s interesting to see how the viewing experience changes between the 70mm IMAX version with an aspect ratio of 1.43:1 and the 35mm cut at 2.39:1. Unfortunately, the website offers no way to approximate what the movie will look like once compressed, streamed over the Internet, and displayed on a cheap TCL TV, to say nothing of how the viewing experience will be impacted should you watch the movie on your phone by way of a series of short YouTube clips while going to the bathroom. Maybe Nolan is saving that for his next film.
If you head over to the movies in one of Waymo’s vehicles, you can feel a little better about the long-term ecological impact of your trip thanks to a recently announced partnership between the autonomous car maker and B2U Storage Solutions. Under the agreement, old batteries pulled from Waymo’s fleet of self-driving electric cars will get a second life as localized grid storage.
The idea is that batteries which no longer hold enough charge to power a robo-taxi should still have enough capacity to store the energy produced by renewable sources so it can be doled out later when the demand goes up. By installing these batteries in the cities that Waymo actually operates their vehicles in, they don’t have to worry about shipping them around either — they can just yank them out of the car, and wire them right into the grid. Of course, eventually the batteries will be too cooked to adequately perform in this role as well, but this should give them a few more productive years before they get torn down and scrapped.
Like many people who read Hackaday, we are fairly fluent in a number of computer languages, but we have to admit it is easier to pick up languages that look like they group with things like Fortran. Sure, modern languages have all sorts of features, but the idea that you have a text file that executes in some order, variables, statements, and so on runs through most popular languages, but not all of them. Lisp and its variants are a different way of looking at things. And then there’s Prolog. [Alexander Petros] has an interesting way of explaining Prolog as a Pokémon game.
Prolog was “the next big thing” when AI meant expert systems. It is more of a specialized database where you define facts and rules that the computer can infer answers to queries. For example, if the facts say that Paul and Anna both have Mary as a parent, and a rule says that people with the same parent are siblings, then a query asking whether Paul and Anna are siblings will indicate that they are.
The Pokéwalker is a gadget that was sold alongside the Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver games for the Nintendo DS which players could use to take a Pokémon out on a walk in the real world. Not only would you earn points while walking, but you’d be able to find items, battle wild enemies, etc. The Pokémon inside the device is however linked to the game cartridge. This fact turned into tragedy when [Etchy] found his old Pokéwalker with a treasured Pokémon still on it, but was forced to erase the device as he had lost the cartridge over the years.
Although he had been told repeatedly by then that it was impossible to transfer such a digital pet to a new save file, this never felt right. Although it made some sense that a specific critter would be linked to a specific save file as a level of security, there’s also the question of whether all data of the Pokémon in question would be erased from said save file.
Fortunately, [Dmitry] has reverse-engineered the Pokéwalker already, including the infrared protocol that uses the IR transceiver in the cartridge itself. As it turns out, only some basic information is sent over to the device, while the Pokémon is simply hidden in the save file, including the data that isn’t sent to the device. Case closed, right?
It would be a sad ending for those who have lost Pokémon on these devices if it was that simple, fortunately. After some digging, [Etchy] found out that the device only checks for three pieces of information to ensure that it is being accessed from a valid game session: the version (HeartGold or SoulSilver), the region (NA, JP, etc.), and the training and secret IDs.
This thus means that if you try long enough, or use an RNG manipulation hack as demonstrated, you can get a new save file created that has the exact same IDs. As long as you make sure that your local critter’s details in terms of species and form are the same as on the device, there’s nothing really stopping the device from happily handing over the critter’s details.
Of course, the real thing that defines a single Pokémon is its ID (PID) that defines its properties, and this is only saved in the save file. The final answer is thus that there’s no way to rescue a trapped Pokémon, as it only really exists on the cartridge that may or may not still exist in some physical form.
Continue reading “Rescuing A Pokémon Off A Pokéwalker After Losing The Game Cartridge”
Released in 2016, Pokemon Go quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. Even folks who weren’t traditionally interested in the monster-taming franchise were wandering around with their smartphones out, on the hunt for virtual creatures that would appear via augmented reality. Although the number of active users has dropped over the years, it’s estimated that more than 50 million users currently log in and play every month.
From a gameplay standpoint, Go is brilliant. Although the Pokemon that players seek out obviously aren’t real, searching for them closely approximates the in-game experience that the franchise has been known for since its introduction on the Game Boy back in 1996.
But now, instead of moving a character through a virtual landscape in search of the elusive “pocket monsters”, players find them dotted throughout the real world. To be successful, players need to leave their homes and travel to where the Pokemon are physically located — which often happens to be a high-traffic area or other point of interest.
As a game, it’s hard to imagine Pokemon Go being a bigger success. At the peak of its popularity, throngs of players were literally causing traffic jams as they roamed the streets in search of invisible creatures. But what players may not have realized as they scanned the world around them through the game was that they were helping developer Niantic build something even more valuable.
Continue reading “Pokemon Go Had Players Capturing More Than They Realized”
Originally only sold at the Pokémon Center New York in late 2001 for (inflation adjusted) $80, the Pokémon Mini would go on to see a release in Japan and Europe, but never had more than ten games produced for it. Rather than Game Boy-like titles, these were distinct mini games that came on similarly diminutive cartridges. These days it’s barely remembered, but it can readily be used for homebrew titles, as [Inkbox] demonstrates in a recent video.
Inside the device is an Epson-manufactured 16-bit S1C88 processor that runs at 4 MHz and handles basically everything, including video output to the monochrome 96×64 pixel display. System RAM is 4 kB of SRAM, which is enough for the basic games that it was designed for.
The little handheld system offered up some capabilities that even the full-sized Game Boy couldn’t match, such as a basic motion sensor in the form of a reed relay. There’s also 2 MB of ROM space directly addressable without banking.
Programming the device is quite straightforward, not only because of the very accessible ISA, but also the readily available documentation and toolchain. This enables development in C, but in the video assembly is used for the added challenge.
Making the screen tiles can be done in an online editor that [Inkbox] also made, and the game tested in an emulator prior to creating a custom cartridge that uses an RP2040-based board to play the game on real hardware. Although a fairly obscure gaming handheld, it seems like a delightful little system to tinker with and make more games for.
One of the most influential inventions of the 20th century was Big Mouth Billy Bass. A celebrity bigger than the biggest politicians or richest movie stars, there’s almost nothing that could beat Billy. That is, until [Kiara] from Kiara’s Workshop built a Magikarp version of Big Mouth Billy Bass.
Sizing in at over 2 entire feet, the orange k-carp is able to dance, it is able to sing, and it is able to stun the crowd. Magikarp functions the same way as its predecessor; a small button underneath allows the show to commence. Of course, this did not come without its challenges.
Starting the project was easy, just a model found online and some Blender fun to create a basic mold. Dissecting Big Mouth Billy Bass gave direct inspiration for how to construct the new idol in terms of servos and joints. Programming wasn’t even all that much with the use of Bottango for animations. Filling the mold with the silicone filling proved to be a bit more of a challenge.
After multiple attempts with some minor variations in procedure, [Kirara] got the fish star’s skin just right. All it took was a paint job and some foam filling to get the final touches. While this wasn’t the most mechanically challenging animatronic project, we have seen our fair share of more advanced mechanics. For example, check out this animatronic that sees through its own eyes!
