Game Boy Plays Forever

September 11, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

For those of us old enough to experience it first hand, the original Game Boy was pretty incredible, but did have one major downside: battery consumption. In the 90s rechargeable batteries weren’t common, which led to most of us playing our handhelds beside power outlets. Some modern takes on the classic Game Boy address these concerns with modern hardware, but this group from the Delft University of Technology and Northwestern has created a Game Boy clone that doesn’t need any batteries at all, even though it can play games indefinitely.

This build was a proof-of-concept for something called “intermittent computing” which allows a computer to remain in a state of processing limbo until it gets enough energy to perform the next computation. The Game Boy clone, fully compatible with the original Game Boy hardware, is equipped with many tiny solar panels which can harvest energy and is able to halt itself and store its state in nonvolatile memory if it detects that there isn’t enough energy available to continue. This means that Super Mario Land isn’t exactly playable, but other games that aren’t as action-packed can be enjoyed with very little impact in gameplay.

The researchers note that it’ll be a long time before their energy-aware platform becomes commonplace in devices and replaces batteries, but they do think that internet-connected devices that don’t need to be constantly running or powered up would be a good start. There are already some low-powered options available that can keep their displays active when everything else is off, so hopefully we will see even more energy-efficient options in the near future.

Thanks to [Sascho] for the tip!

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GTA V Mod Shows (And Cheats) Those Stunt Jump Hoops

August 21, 2020 by Sven Gregori No comments

While the recent announcement of Grand Theft Auto V for the upcoming next-generation game consoles was a disappointment for those fervently waiting for a successor in the infamous video game series, it shows that after almost seven years of its initial release, the epic title is still going strong — and rightfully so. But a game as varied and complex as GTA V isn’t without some quirks, especially if you’re going for 100% completeness.

The stunt jumps seem a particular pesky nut to crack here, so [Anthony Som] made it his mission to shed some light on what qualifies as a successful jump by reverse engineering the system and writing both a mod for displaying the landing zone and a cheat to instant success.

If you’re not familiar with the game, its vast open world map features a variety of side quests, one of them being stunt jumps, where certain locations allow you to launch the vehicle you’re driving into the air in hopes to land on an adjacent road or area — whether to evade the people chasing you, or just for fun. There’s no telling how to actually succeed though, the game just tells you if you did or not afterwards, causing some degree of frustration. As an avid speedrunner (as in finishing a game in the shortest possible time), [Anthony] was looking for a way to increase the success rate for those stunt jumps, and decided to dig into the code to find out how to get there. Of course, being a proprietary game, he had to resort to reverse engineering and utilizing GTA’s vivid modding scene to do so.

His initial outcome was a mod that displays the launch and landing area as rectangles inside the game itself, which was a great help. But well, after already getting that far, [Anthony] figured he might as well continue and add a cheat mode to teleport the car right inside that expected landing area and be done with second-guessing his attempts once and for all.

If you’re curious about modding GTA yourself, his write-up has a few good pointers for that, and of course features some real examples of it. Whether this is a good idea for the self-driving AI that uses GTA as learning environment is probably a different story though.

Super Mario 64 As Experienced By Mario

July 16, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

Microsoft’s Kinect, a motion-sensing peripherial originally for the Xbox 360, is almost exactly a decade old now. And in that decade it has expanded from its limited existence tied to a console to a widely-used tool for effective and detailed motion sensing, without breaking the bank. While it’s seen use well outside of video games, it’s still being used to reimagine some classic games. In this project, Reddit user [SuperLouis64] has used it to control Mario with his own body.

While the build still involves some use of a hand controller, most of Mario’s movements are controlled by making analogous movements on a small trampoline, including the famed triple jump. The kinect is able to sense all of these movements and translate them into the game using software that [SuperLouis64] built as well. The trickiest movement seems to be Mario’s spin movement, which appears to have taken some practice to get right.

We appreciate the build quality on this one, and [SuperLouis64]’s excitement in playing the game with his creation. It truly looks like a blast to play, and he even mentions in the Reddit thread that he’s gotten a lot of productive excercise with his various VR and augumented reality games in the past few months. Of course if this is too much physical activity, you could always switch to using your car as the unique game controller instead.

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Arduino Plays NES Games

July 15, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

Watching the advancement of technology is interesting enough by looking at improved specifications for various components as the years go by. But clock speeds, memory size, and power consumption are all fairly intangible compared to actual implementation of modern technology when compared to days of yore. For example, this $40 microcontroller can do what a video game console was able to do in the 80s for a tenth of the (inflation adjusted) price.

The NESDUE is an emulator for NES games which runs completely on an Arduino Due. The Arduino does have some limitations that have to be worked around to get the Nintendo to work, though. For one, it needs to be overclocked to be playable and it also needs a workaround to get past the memory limit of 96 kB of RAM. From there, a small screen is wired up along with a controller (from a Super Nintendo) and the gaming can begin.

This is an impressive feat for an Arduino platform to accomplish, especially with the amount of memory tweaking that has to happen. This might be the most advanced gaming system available that runs everything on an Arduino, right up there with the Arduinocade which can provide an arcade-like experience straight from the Arduino as well.

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Classic 8-Bit Computing The Atari Way

April 29, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

In the classic gaming world, even before the NES arrived on the scene, there was no name more ubiquitous than Atari. Their famous 2600 console sold almost as many units as the Nintendo 64, but was released nearly 20 years prior. In many ways, despite making mistakes that led to the video game crash of the early 80s, Atari was the first to make a path in the video game industry. If you want to explore what the era of 8-bit computing was like in the Atari age, a new resource is compiling all kinds of Atari-based projects.

This site has everything, from assembling Atari 8-bit computers based on the 6502 chip, to programming them in BASIC and assembly, to running official and homebrew games on the hardware itself. This was put together by [Jason H. Moore] who grew up around Atari systems and later, their home computers. He even puts his biomedical experience to use here by designing a game for the 2600 called Gene Medic which can be found at the site as well.

If you grew up in the 70s and 80s and are looking for a bit of Atari nostalgia this site is the place to go. It’s even worth a visit from younger folks as well since the 8-bit world is a lot easier to get immersed in and learn the fundamentals of computer science. Of course, if you want to take it the other direction, it’s possible to modify the old Atari to add a few modern conveniences.

Photo via Evan-Amos

HoloLens Brings Video Game Kart Racing To Life

January 3, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

There aren’t a lot of video game experiences we can easily recreate in the physical realm. You’ll quickly find that jumping on mushrooms in the real world doesn’t have nearly the same appeal as it does in Super Mario, and we won’t even get into the dangers of trying to recreate Frogger on your local multi-lane. But video game style go-kart racing? We have all the technology to pull that off, somebody just has to put all the pieces together.

Which is precisely what [Ian Charnas] is trying to do with his latest project. Using Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset, electric go-karts, 433 MHz wireless transceivers, and some Arduinos sprinkled in, he’s created the closest thing to Mario Kart that us flesh and blood mortals are likely to experience anytime soon.

The HoloLens headset worn by each driver overlays the necessary graphical elements like pickups and weapon effects, as well as puts over-the-top cartoon heads on the other racers. But of course, that’s only half of the story. Seeing the pickups and gadgets doesn’t do you any good if they don’t have any effect on the actual race.

To that end, [Ian] has come up with a way to control the performance of the go-karts using an electronic “backpack” that mounts to each kart. So speed boosting pickups actually make the kart go faster, and if a driver gets hit with a weapon fired at them, they get slowed down.

That’s the high-level version, anyway. There’s obviously a lot going on behind the scenes, some of which are detailed on the Hackaday.io page. One of the interesting notes is that the HoloLens needs visual markers to orient itself, which in the video after the break can be seen as black and white posters dotting the walls alongside the track. As the project progresses, [Ian] is hoping that these can be camouflaged in creative ways (such as being made to look like audience members or checkered flags) to make the overall experience more immersive.

According to [Ian], the next step is to find partners who want to help elevate this from a one-off project to something that you might actually see at an amusement park. We wish him luck, if for no other reason than we really want to play the thing ourselves. In the meantime, we’ll have to settle for racing hacked Power Wheels.

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Entombed Secrets Partially Unearthed As Researchers Dissect Clever Maze-Generating Algorithm

September 30, 2019 by Brian McEvoy 23 Comments

If you look at enough of another developer’s code, you will eventually say, “What were you thinking, you gosh-darn lunatic?” Now, this exchange can precede the moment where you quit a company and check into a padded room, or it can be akin to calling someone a mad genius and offering them a beer. In the case of [Steven Sidley]’s 1982 game Entombed, [John Aycock] and [Tara Copplestone] found a mysterious table for generating pseudo-random mazes and wrote a whitepaper on how it all works (PDF). The table only generates solvable mazes, but if any bits are changed, the puzzles become inescapable.

The software archaeologists are currently in a labyrinth of their own, in which the exit is an explanation of the table, but the path is overgrown with decade-old vines. The programmer did not make the table himself, and its creator’s name is buried somewhere in the maze. Game cart storage was desperately limited so mazes had to be generated on-the-fly rather than crafted and stored. Entombed‘s ad-hoc method worked by assessing the previous row and generating the next based on particular criteria, with some PRNG in places to keep it fresh. To save more space, the screen was mirrored down the center which doubles the workload of the table. Someday this mysterious table’s origins may be explained but for now, it is a work of art in its own right.

Aside from a table pulled directly from the aether, this maze game leaned on pseudo-random numbers but there is room for improvement in that regard too.

Via BBC Future.