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22:00
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Hack a Day
[Bitluni]’s motto seems to be, “When you’re busy, get busier.” At least that would explain adding even more work to his plate in the run-up to the Hanover Maker Faire and coming up with a ten-player game console from scratch.
As for this being extra work, recall that [bitluni] had already committed to building a giant ping pong ball LED wall for the gathering. That consisted of prototyping a quarter-scale panel, building custom tooling to get him past the literal pain point of punching 1200 holes, and wiring, programming and testing the whole display. Building a game console that supports ten players at once seems almost tame by comparison. The console is built around an ESP32 module, either WROOM or WROVER thanks to a clever multifunctional pad layout on the slick-looking white PCBs. [bitluni] went with a composite video output using the fast R-2R ladder network DAC that he used for his ESP32 VGA project. The console supports ten Nintendo gamepads for a simple but engaging game something like the Tron light cycles. Unsurprisingly, players found it more fun to just crash into each other on purpose.
Sure, it could have been biting off more than he could chew, but [bitluni] delivered and we appreciate the results. There’s something to be said for adding a little pressure to the creative process.
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22:00
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Hack a Day
Way back when, home computers and consoles didn’t have the RAM or storage space for full-length recorded audio tracks. Instead, a variety of techniques were used to synthesize music on the fly. The SNES was no exception, using the SPC700 Wavetable Synthesis chip to bust out the tunes. [Foxchild] wanted to use this chip as a standalone synthesizer, but didn’t want to hack up a console to do so. Thus, the SNES Drone was born!
Instead of gutting the console for the juicy chips inside, à la most SID based builds, the SNES Drone takes a different approach. It consists of a cartridge which interfaces with a stock SNES console, making the install easy and non-invasive.
The build is in an alpha state, with the oscillators in the SNES generating continuous tones, with frequency and volume controlled by potentiometers mounted on the cartridge. Having physical controls on the cartridge makes the build feel more like a real synth, and promises to look awesome on stage for a chiptune performance.
[Foxchild] is looking for others to get involved to help get the project to the next stage, so if you’re interested, reach out on the Hackaday.io page. We’ve seen other projects to liberate the awesome chip sounds of yesteryear, too. Video after the break.
https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/1626336958090272/05F4424A-10F0-40EF-84CE-B289995F3D8B.mp4
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19:00
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Hack a Day
Those alive during the 1990s will remember the clear or “crystal” versions of various home consoles. Made with the usual injection molding processes, they usually came out somewhere closer to a smoky translucency and didn’t reveal much of the insides. [BitHead1000] likes to do things right though, and has busted out an awesome acrylic case mod for his NES.
The build starts with the disassembly of the original console, naturally, and the RF shielding is discarded in order to provide an unobstructed view of the internals. The acrylic case is then built up piece by piece, using the original case as a template. Flame polishing is used to treat the edges, and everything is stuck together using what appears to be acrylic cement. For a nice finishing touch, the cartridge door gets a frosted Nintendo logo, thanks to some careful work in the sandblasting booth.
The final product looks stunning, and the transparent case lends itself excellently to edge-lighting thanks to a few LEDs. We’ve seen [BitHead1000’s] work before, with the stunning flamethrowing N64 build. Video after the break.
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1:01
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Hack a Day
Love it or hate it, the Nintendo 64 controller doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Dedicated fans are still looking for ways to use the unique trilobed controller with modern systems, and they won’t be satisfied until they perfectly replicate the original experience. [Shyri Villar] has been working on perfecting a blend of original and modern hardware that looks very promising.
The project started when [Shyri] found that you could take the internals from a modern third party Bluetooth N64 controller made by 8BitDo and put them into the original controller’s case. This would give you the original buttons back, and overall a more authentic weight and feel. Unfortunately, this usually means dumping the original N64 joystick for the 8BitDo’s.
What [Shyri] wanted to do was install the 8BitDo PCB into an original N64 controller, but adapt Nintendo’s joystick to communicate with it. Unfortunately, since the original joystick used optical encoders and the 8BitDo version uses potentiometers, there’s something of a language gap.
To bridge the divide, both the X and Y dimensions of the joystick get their own PIC12F675 microcontroller and X9C103S digital potentiometer. The microcontrollers read the X and Y values from the original joystick’s encoders, and use the digital potentiometers to provide the 8BitDo with the expected analog input. Right now the electronics are held on two scraps of perfboard tucked into the side “wings” of the controller, but hopefully we’ll see a custom PCB in the future.
If you’re more interested in going back in time with your trusty N64 controller, then you might be interested in learning more about how one hacker managed to hook it up to the MSX.
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22:01
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Hack a Day
Consoles over the years have innovated, bringing new features and experiences with each subsequent generation. Rumble, motion controls and more recently VR have all come to the fore as companies vie for supremacy in the marketplace. Nobody’s really had the guts to tackle fire, though. Until now.
The case and spinning logo alone would have made the front page; the fire is simply next level. Our parents were always telling us to sit further from the TV… and now we know why.
The build is based on the Nintendo 64. The motherboard is removed from the original case, and fitted to a sheet metal enclosure of impressive craftsmanship. This allows the fitment of the machine’s party piece — twin jets of flame, triggered by an extra button on the controller. There’s also a spinning N64 logo built into the front of the case, backlit in a foreboding red — hinting to the player that this is no regular console.
The console is capable of shooting flames up to 4 feet long, and if you have to ask why, you’re likely on the wrong website. We’d love to see the jets triggered by rumble, ideally on a per player basis — making bouts of Mario Kart and Smash Brothers more perilous than ever.
As it turns out, fire’s also a great way to visualise sound waves. Video after the break.
[Thanks to marcelvarallo for the tip!]
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22:00
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Hack a Day
Historically gaming consoles are sold at little-to-no profit in order to entice customers with a low up-front price. The real profits roll in afterwards from sales of games and accessories. Seeking a slice of the latter, aftermarket accessory makers jump in with reverse-engineered compatible products at varying levels of “compatible”.
When the Nintendo Switch was released with a standard USB-C port for accessories, we had hoped those days of hit-or-miss reverse engineering were over, but reality fell short. Redditor [VECTORDRIVER] summarized a few parts of this story where Nintendo deviated from spec, and accessory makers still got things wrong.
Officially, Nintendo declared the Switch USB-C compliant. But as we’ve recently covered, USB-C is a big and complicated beast. Determined to find the root of their issues, confused consumers banded together on the internet to gather anecdotal evidence and speculate. One theory is that Nintendo’s official dock deviated from official USB-C dimensions in pursuit of a specific tactile feel; namely reducing tolerance on proper USB-C pin alignment and compensating with an internal mechanism. With Nintendo playing fast and loose with the specs, it makes developing properly functioning aftermarket accessories all the more difficult.
But that’s not the only way a company can slip up with their aftermarket dock. A teardown revealed Nyko didn’t use a dedicated chip to manage USB power delivery, choosing instead to implement it in software running on ATmega8. We can speculate on why (parts cost? time to market?) but more importantly we can read the actual voltage on its output pins which are too high. Every use becomes a risky game of “will this Switch tolerate above-spec voltage today?” We expect that as USB-C becomes more common, it would soon be cheapest and easiest to use a dedicated chip, eliminating the work of an independent implementation and risk of doing it wrong.
These are fairly typical early teething problems for a new complex technology on their road to ubiquity. Early USB keyboard and mice didn’t always work, and certain combination of early PCI-Express cards and motherboards caused damage. Hopefully USB-C problems — and memories of them — will fade in time as well.
[via Ars Technica]
[Main image source: iFixit Nintendo Switch Teardown]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
Working under the pressure of being watched on a live feed, [DeadlyFoez] pits himself against the so-called unhackable Wii Mini and shows unprecedented results all while recording hours of footage of his process for others to follow along. We dug through that content to find the gems of the process, the links below include timestamps to those moments.
The Wii Mini is a cost-reduced version of Nintendo’s best-selling console, sold near the end of its life with a few features removed such as GameCube backwards compatibility and SD card support. Along with that, in an effort to thwart the jailbreaking that had plagued its big sister Nintendo made it so the NAND memory (where the system is stored) is encrypted and keyed to each device’s Hollywood GPU chip. This defeats methods which modified the storage in order to gain access to the hardware.
That did not stop [DeadlyFoez] from trying anyway, planning out the steps he needed to achieve a hacked Mini unit with the help of a regular Wii donor, already hacked. After dumping both systems’ NANDs and exploring the Wii Mini hardware further, he found a few pleasant surprises. There are test points on the board which allow GameCube controllers to be used with it. There are also SD card connections physically present on the board, but the support was removed from the Mini’s system software.
The most interesting parts come later on however: by simultaneously swapping NAND and GPU chips between original Wii and Wii Mini, [DeadlyFoez] manages to put together two distinct systems. The first is an original Wii board with the Mini’s chips claimed to be “the first Wii Mini running homebrew software”. The second, filling the opposite side of the equation, with both hardware and software to add SD card and GameCube controller ports to a Wii Mini.
This process of BGA rework in order to mod Nintendo hardware into unorthodox versions of themselves has actually been done before a few years ago, when someone made an unofficial US region non-XL new 3DS by piecing together parts from two separate consoles.
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4:00
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Hack a Day
While it might not be quite as revered as its predecessor, the Game Boy Advance is arguably the peak of “classic” handheld gaming, before things got all 3D and dual screen on us. One of its best features is the so-called multiboot mode, which allows the GBA to download a program from its link port. Officially this feature was introduced so you could play multiplayer with your friends even if they didn’t have the game cartridge, but naturally it didn’t take long for hackers to realize you can use it to run arbitrary code on an unmodified system.
[Shyri Villar] has put this capability to excellent use with a plug-in board that allows a stock GBA to be used as a general purpose Bluetooth HID controller. Now you can emulate GBA games on your computer while using the real thing as your input device. Or if that’s a bit too redundant for you, then any 2D game you think could benefit from the classic Game Boy control layout.
An ATmega328P on the board initiates the multiboot sequence when the system powers up, and feeds it the GBA program that’s stored on a W25Q32 chip. Once the code is running on the GBA, it communicates with a common HC-05 Bluetooth module through the same link port. To perform this handoff, [Shyri] uses a HCF4066 switch IC to literally change the pin assignments in the connector from the SPI used to upload the ROM to the UART lines of the Bluetooth module.
With everything powered from the 3.3 V provided by the GBA’s link port, and some software niceties like the ability to store Bluetooth pairing information for subsequent device connections, this is actually a very practical gadget. The fact that you can do this on a completely stock GBA is very compelling, especially considering some of the previous Bluetooth Game Boy modifications we’ve seen. Granted the market might be somewhat limited, but with a custom PCB and a 3D printed enclosure, we could see this potentially being a popular accessory for the classic handheld. It’s not like it can be any more niche than using the GBA as a remote display for your multimeter.
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22:00
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Hack a Day
It may be hard to believe, but thanks to the expert work of Nintendo aficionado [Bill Paxton], the Game Boy Advance SP and GameCube lovechild that you see before you started its life as a Wii. That means not only can it play commercial GameCube and Wii games, but also has access to the wide library of homebrew games and emulators available for those systems.
To create this marvel, [Bill] first had to expertly cut away extraneous components from the Wii’s motherboard. He then mated the “trimmed” PCB to a new board that holds the controls as well as some other ancillary components such as the audio amplifier and USB port. He even managed to squeeze a battery in there, as demonstrated in the video after the break.
Finally, he designed a 3D printed enclosure that incorporates GameCube-style controls (complete with printed buttons) into the classic clamshell Game Boy SP shape. Because of the complexity of the design, [Bill] decided to have it professionally printed at Shapeways rather than trying to run it off of his home printer, which he says helps sells the professional look. It did take him some trial and error before he got the hang of painting the printed material to his satisfaction, but we think the end result was certainly worth the effort.
It probably won’t come as a huge surprise to find that this isn’t the first time [Bill] has pulled off a stunt like this. A few years back he created a very similar “GameCube SP”, but by the looks of it, this revised attempt improves on the original version in every way possible.
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16:00
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Hack a Day
Modern consoles are fun, but there are certain charms to retro gear that keep hackers entertained to this day. The original NES is a particularly ripe ground for projects, being one of the most popular consoles of its era. [kevtris] is one such Nintendo hacker, and decided to get NES games running on an old-school electroluminescent display (Youtube video, embedded below).
The display in this project was originally used in an industrial pick-and-place machine.
Rather than work with an original NES, [kevtris] chose to instead work with the NT Mini, an FPGA-based clone of his own design. Having picked up an EL640.480-AA1 screen, formerly from a DEK 265LT pick-and-place machine, he hunted down a data sheet and got to work. With the document outlining the required video input specifications, it was a simple matter of whipping up some Verilog and an adapter cable to get things working.
Mario, Kirby and friends can now run around, looking resplendent in the 9 colors of the red/green EL display. [kevtris] notes that the screen performs well with fast motion, and estimates the refresh rate to be in the vicinity of 60Hz. For those of you playing along at home, such screens are available online, though they’re not exactly cheap.
We’ve seen [kevtris]’s work before, with his SNES chiptune player being particularly impressive. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Morris for the tip!]
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4:01
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Hack a Day
The Wii controller will likely go down in history as the hacker’s favorite repurposed input device, and there’s no question that the Raspberry Pi is the community’s top pick in terms of Linux single board computers. So it should come as little surprise that somebody has finally given us the cross-over episode that the hacking community deserves: the PiChuk, a Pi Zero inside of Nintendo’s motion-sensing “nunchuk”.
Veterans of Wii Sports might be wondering how the hero of our story, a hacker by the name of [keycaps], managed to pull off such a feat. The Pi Zero is small, but it’s not that small. The trick is that the case of the nunchuk has been extended by way of a new 3D printed bottom half.
There’s more than just a Pi Zero along for the ride, as well. [keycaps] has manged to sneak in a 750 mAh LiPo and an Adafruit Powerboost, making the device a completely self-contained system. Interestingly, the original nunchuk PCB remains more or less untouched, with just a couple of wires connected to the Pi’s GPIO ports so it can read the button and stick states over I2C.
We know you’re wondering why [keycaps] went through the trouble of breaking out the HDMI port on the bottom. It turns out, the PiChuk is being used to drive a Vufine wearable display; think Google Glass, but without the built-in computing power. The analog stick and motion sensing capabilities of the controller should make for a very natural input scheme, as far as wearable computers go.
So not only could the PiChuk make for an awesome wireless input device for your next project, it’s actually a pretty strong entry into the long line of wearable computing devices based on the Pi. Usually these have included a DIY version of the distinctive Google Glass display, but offloading that onto a commercially available version is certainly a lot easier.
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8:30
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Hack a Day
Nintendo’s LABO piano is a strange kind of instrument. Hewn out of cardboard and used in combination with some advanced software, it’s entirely passive, with all the sound generation and smarts coming from the Switch console which slots into the body. [Simon the Magpie] decided that this simply wouldn’t do, and set about turning the LABO piano into a real synthesizer (Youtube link, embedded below).
In order to pull off this feat, [Simon] sourced an OKAY synth kit– a basic monophonic synthesizer designed to fit inside a 3D printed case. Instead, here it’s built inside the LABO’s roomy cardboard housing. The keyboard is reinforced with duct tape and tweaked to accept those common and horrible red SPST buttons, and the front panel is fitted with control dials where the Switch would usually sit.
After some careful crafting, the piano is ready to rock. It’s not the most responsive instrument, with the flexible cardboard struggling to reliably trigger the installed buttons, but it does work. [Simon] performs a small instrumental piece over a drum track to demonstrate that you don’t need a Nintendo Switch to have fun with the LABO piano.
Expect to see similar builds on stage at chiptune shows in the next few years – at least until mold gets the better of them. There are other ways to hack the LABO piano, too. Video after the break.
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11:30
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Hack a Day
While it might not be the most traditional design, there’s no debating that Nintendo created something truly special when they unleashed the GameCube controller on an unsuspecting world back in 2001. Hardcore fans are still using the controller to this day with current-generation Nintendo consoles, and there’s considerable interest in adding modern conveniences like USB support to the nearly 20-year-old design.
One particularly promising project is the BlueCubeMod created by [Nathan Reeves]. He’s developed a small custom PCB that can be installed into an official GameCube controller to turn it into a Bluetooth device. You do have to sacrifice the original cord and force feedback for this mod, but we think many will see the ability to use this iconic controller with their computer or phone as a pretty fair trade.
The PCB holds an ESP32-PICO-D4 which is operating as a standard Bluetooth HID controller for maximum compatibility with modern systems. Control signals are pulled directly from the controller’s original PCB with just two wires, making the installation very simple. Wondering where the power comes from? As the rumble motor isn’t supported anyway, that gets tossed and in its places goes a 700 mAh battery which powers the controller for up to six hours. Overall it’s a very clean modification that [Nathan] believes even beginners will be capable of, and he ultimately plans to turn this design into a commercial kit.
Currently you still need a receiver if you want to use the BlueCubeMod with the Nintendo Switch, but [Nathan] says he’s working on a way to get around that requirement by potentially switching out the ESP32 for a STM32 with a CC256x radio. He says this will give him more direct control over the Bluetooth communications, which should allow him to take into tackle the intricacies of talking to the Switch directly.
Of course, the GameCube did have an official wireless controller back in the day. We’ve seen modifications to get the WaveBird to get it talking to modern systems as well, but there’s something to be said for slimmer form factor of the original edition.
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22:00
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Hack a Day
Emulating SNES games hits us right in the nostalgic feels, but playing SNES games on an 1920×1080 monitor is a painful reminder of the limitations of SNES hardware. [DerKoun] felt the same consternation, and decided to do something about it. He realized that some SNES games have much higher resolution textures that weren’t being taken advantage of. The SNES had a revolutionary video mode, mode 7, that allowed a game to set a relatively high resolution background, and then rotate and scale that background during gameplay.
This pseudo 3d effect was amazing for its time, but taking a high resolution image and squashing it into a 320 by 240 pixel viewport makes for some painful artefacts. This is where [DerKoun]’s hack comes in. He wrote a modification to the bsnes emulator, allowing those rotations and scaling to happen in full resolution, vastly improving the visuals of mode 7 games.
The latest teaser for what’s to come is shown above, mapping the mode 7 backgrounds onto a widescreen viewport, as well as HD.
Come back after the break for some mind blowing SNES HD PilotWings action!
Via Ars Technica
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19:00
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Hack a Day
Late last year, news broke of impossibly rare artifact from the age of the Nintendo Entertainment System. SimCity was the classic simulation game for PC and just about every other console, and it was written for the NES but never released. Now one guy finally got around to digging out his copy, which was dumped at the Portland Retro Gaming Expos and finally put on the Internet. It’s an unfinished game but it’s mostly playable, even if it is a bit more primitive than the PC version.
[Matt] wanted to build his own copy of SimCity for the NES, so that’s what he did. It’s a project that took months of work and a ton of research, but finally there’s a professional-looking cartridge version of SimCity.
With the ROM for SimCity loose on the Internet, that part of the build was relatively easy. You can still get EPROMs or EEPROMs, UV erasers, and a good programmer will run you fifty bucks through the usual vendors. There are even places on the Internet that will split up the emulator-compatible ROM file into two files for the character and program ROM in each NES cartridge. The trick here is finding the right cartridge with the right mapper. It turns out there are only four games that you can simply drop SimCity ROM chips into and expect everything to work. All of these games cost a small fortune, but their Famicom versions are cheap.
After carefully desoldering the Famicom game, soldering in the new chips, and applying a fancy professional label, [Matt] had his cartridge version of SimCity for the NES. It’s for a Famicom, though, but you can get adapters for that. Check out the video below.
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Casemodding, or stuffing video game consoles into shapes they were never meant to be in, is the preserve of a special breed. Our favorites are when old consoles are stuffed into different versions of the same console. Remember that gigantic O.G. Brick Game Boy carrying case? Yes, you can turn that into a jumbo-scale Game Boy, and it’s sweet. Continuining this trend of consoles of a different size, [Madmorda] has stuffed a GameCube into a sugar cube. It’s small. It’s really small, and it’s some of the best casemodding we’ve seen.
First off, the enclosure. This is an officially licensed micro GameCube case that originally housed gummy candies crafted by gummy artisans who work exclusively in the medium of gummy. This case, incidentally, is the perfect scale to match [Madmorda]’s earlier work, a miniaturized GameCube controller. This controller was originally a keychain, but with a bit of fine soldering skills it can indeed become a functional GameCube controller.
With the candy container GameCube gutted, the only task remaining was to put a GameCube inside. This is a lot easier if you tear down a Wii, and after desoldering, resoldering, and generally cutting up the circuit board of a Wii, [Madmorda] had something very small.
The finished console is a complete GameCube, compatible with all games, and no emulation. There are four controller ports, two USB ports for memory card slots, and output is composite through a 3.5mm jack. It’s a great piece of work and looks exactly like a miniaturized GameCube.
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The Zelda series of games are known for their exciting gameplay, compelling story, but also their soundtracks. From fast-paced boss battles, to scenes of emotional turmoil, these tunes have been pumped out millions of Nintendo consoles over the years. [Tyler Barnes] has been a fan for a long time, and …read more
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Emulation of classic consoles has long been a solved problem. It’s now possible to run thousands of vintage games on a computer the size of a stick of gum, and to do so with all the benefits emulation brings. [M-Parks] isn’t the biggest fan, however – and decided to build …read more
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The Pokémon games have delighted legions of Nintendo gamers over the years, and show no signs of slowing down any time soon. Despite its popularity, there are certain aspects of the games that are unarguably about simply grinding your way to success. For [Mori Bellamy], this simply wouldn’t do – …read more
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We’ve all seen the 3D printed replicas of classic game consoles which house a Raspberry Pi; in fact, there’s a pretty good chance some of the people reading this post have one of their own. They’re a great way to add some classic gaming emulation to your entertainment center, especially …read more
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Reinforcement learning has been a hot-button area of research into artificial intelligence. This is a method where software agents make decisions and refine these over time based on analyzing resulting outcomes. [Kamil Rocki] had been exploring this field, but needed some more powerful tools. As it turned out, a cluster …read more
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Nintendo’s Game Boy was the handheld of the 1990s. Like many of their products, it was famous for its ability to stand up to punishment from angry children and military strikes alike. Its biggest weakness is perhaps its unbacklit LCD screen. Retrogamers and chiptuners alike find themselves modifying and replacing …read more
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Microcontrollers come in a broad swathe of capabilities these days. There are the venerable 8-bit micros that have been around forever and valiantly crunch away, all the way up to modern 32-bit powerhouses with advanced peripherals and huge amounts of RAM and ROM. If you’re blinking a few LEDs or …read more
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The Nintendo GameCube was the first console from Big N with disc-based media. Gone were the cartridges that were absurdly expensive to manufacture. In theory games could be cheaper (yeah, right), and would hold more textures, pictures, and video. Around the time the GameCube hit shelves, your basic home computer started getting DVD burners, and you could walk into Circuit City and buy those tiny little DVD-Rs. But you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t burn GameCube games, at least without advanced soldering skills.
One company did. Datel, a British company that produced the Action Replay, the ‘Game Genie of the …read more
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Hack a Day
Handheld consoles have to make a lot of design choices that their TV connected brethren don’t have to worry about. Battery life is important, as is screen visibility, and the games can’t be too bulky or unwieldy if you’re going to be carrying them around all day. [Chris] is no stranger to building handheld versions of home consoles, and took a few of these lessons on board in his latest portable SNES build.
The motherboard was provided by a SNES Jr., a lightweight, compact model released towards the end of the console’s reign. This was small enough that it required …read more
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The Nintendo 64 is a classic console now, and much loved, despite losing in commercial stakes to the dominating PlayStation from Sony. It’s one that doesn’t always get as much attention in the homebrew and hacker scene, compared to platforms like the NES and Game Boy. This means the tools required to work with the console aren’t as well-known. However, there’s a remarkably easy way to load homebrew on to the Nintendo 64, if you’ve got the right hardware.
To pull this off, you’ll need a N64 Gameshark, particularly a version higher than 3.0. These included a parallel port and …read more
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Why would anyone bother to create new content for a console system that’s staring down its 40th birthday? Perhaps just for the challenge of fitting a game into 40 kilobytes of storage.
That at least seems to be the motivation behind [Morphcat Games] pending release of Micro Mages, a new game for the Nintendo Entertainment System console that takes its inspiration from Super Mario Bros. The interesting bit here is how they managed to stuff so much content into so little space. The video below goes into great detail on that, and it’s a fascinating lesson in optimization. …read more
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The original Star Fox for the SNES was a landmark game. With the Super FX chip built into the cartridge, it presented the first 3D accelerated home console experience. The series has spanned several consoles and over two decades. Now, it’s getting an (albeit unofficial) port to the Arduboy, thanks to [Stephane Hockenhull].
Impressively, the game fits in under 28KB, and [Stephane] hasn’t skimped on the development details. The process begun with setting up a basic 3D engine on the Arduboy, followed by some tests of various gameplay ideas. The final implementation bears a strong similarity to the original SNES …read more
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If you grew up watching the Pokémon TV series, you’d naturally be familiar with the cries of all your favourite Pocket Monsters. Most of the creatures in the anime tend to say their own name, over and over again. Pour one out for the legions of parents who, upon hearing a distant “PIKA PIKA!”, still involuntarily twitch to this day.
However, the games differ heavily in this area. Generation I of Pokémon was released on the Game Boy, which simply didn’t have the sound capabilities to deliver full bitstream audio. Instead, sounds were synthesized for the various Pokémon based on …read more
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Hack a Day
Like many retro favourites, the Game Boy is in no way dead — development continues apace through its many fans.But what about the hardware side? This is a particularly interesting one: [Alex] wondered if a Game Boy could be readily used as a wireless controller. Set out to make it happen, the final product is a game cartridge that makes the classic handheld a wireless controller.
It’s achieved quite elegantly, with a custom cartridge used to turn the Game Boy into a controller while requiring no modification to the handheld. The cartridge contains a flash chip to store the ROM, …read more
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Fans of game consoles from the golden era of TV game appliances have been in for a treat over the past couple of years, and a slew of official reboots of the stars of the past have reached the market. These so-called “classic” consoles closely follow the styling of the originals, but under the hood they pack modern hardware running an emulator to play a selection of games from ROM. Since with a bit of hacking they can thus run more than just the supplied emulator, people have managed to use them to emulator completely different consoles. Even then, it’s …read more
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The Game Boy Camera is a legendary piece of 90s gaming hardware, despite not being a game at all. It consisted of a low-resolution greyscale camera, fitted to a Game Boy cartridge, that you could use to photograph your friends, vandalise their pictures, then print them out on a thermal printer. It’s hardware that was fun because of its limitations, not despite them. However, [Matt] wondered if there was a way to use early photographic techniques to get color photos.
The technique is simple – get red, green, and blue filters, and take three photos – one using each filter. …read more
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It’s a rare game that is able to bridge the gap between sports game fans and those that identify as hardcore gamers. Midway was able to bring those two groups onto common ground when they released NBA Jam to arcades in 1993. The game was an instant hit and was ported to 16-bit home consoles that same year. Compromises were made during those ports, so an attempt to make them more inline with the arcade release came in the form of NBA Jam: Tournament Edition a year later. However, in the heart of [eskayelle] NBA Jam: TE on the Super …read more
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The concept of creating a gaming portable out of a home console has been around for some time, but it’s hardly seen the other way around. There have been a few devices that dared to straddle the line (i.e., Sega Nomad, Nintendo Switch, etc.), but the two worlds typically remain separate. [Stephen] looked to explore that space by attempting to turn the Game Boy Advance into a “big boy” console. The FPGA-based mod kit he created does just that, and comes complete with controller support and digital video output in 720p over a mini HDMI cable.
The kit itself was …read more
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Wheel of Fortune is a television game show, born in the distant year of 1975. Like many popular television properties of the era, it spawned a series of videogames on various platforms. Like many a hacker, [Chris] had been loading up the retro NES title on his Raspberry Pi when he realized that, due to the limitations of the cartridge format, he was playing the same puzzles over and over again. There was nothing for it, but to load a hex editor and get to work.
[Chris’s] initial investigation involved loading up the ROM in a hex editor and simply …read more
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The latest entry in the fan favorite franchise Pokémon saw release earlier this month alongside a particularly interesting controller. Known as the Poké Ball Plus, this controller is able to control Pokémon games that are available on completely separate platforms, as well as transfer data between them. It rumbles, It talks, it lights up, it’s wireless, and [Spawn] uploaded a video that reveals what’s really inside.
The entire controller is only around two inches (50mm) in diameter and weighs roughly 2.3 ounces (65g) yet packs quite a bit of tech into such a small form factor. It connects to iOS, …read more
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Being relegated to player two used to be a mark of disgrace in the 8-bit era of videogames. Between never being to select a level and having to wait your turn to play, the second player experience was decidedly third rate. Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System was no different in this regard as it offered no character selection option and also required players to alternate taking control upon failing stages. It made the two player mode more like playing in parallel than actually together. However, there is a new ROM Hack for the original Super Mario Bros. …read more
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They just don’t make them like they used to. Digital televisions have rendered so many of the videogames designed in the days where CRTs ruled the earth virtually unplayable due to display lag. Games that were already difficult thanks to tight reaction time windows can become rage inducing experiences when button presses don’t reflect what’s happening onscreen. A game that would fall into the aforementioned category is Mike Tyson’s Punchout for the NES. However, NES homebrew developer [nesdoug] created a patch for the 31 year old classic that seeks to give players playing on modern displays a fighting chance.
The …read more
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In case you’re not a ’90s kid, the Nintendo Power Glove is the greatest device for human-computer interaction ever created. It’s so good, they called it bad, and then they made a movie about it. At its heart, the Power Glove is just some force sensors in the fingers of a glove, but that hasn’t stopped hackers from cracking these gloves open for years. We’ve seen the Power Glove used in Hackaday Prize entries before, we’ve seen it control quadcopters, we’ve seen it used as a Vive controller, and the Ultimate Power Glove comes loaded up with Bluetooth, motion …read more
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Hack a Day
For many of us, being given a big old DIP ROM from nearly thirty years ago and being told to retrieve its contents would be a straightforward enough task. We’d simply do what we would have done in the 1980s, and hook up its address lines to a set of ports, pull its chip select line high, and harvest what came out of the data lines for each address.
But imagine for a minute that an old-fashioned parallel ROM is a component you aren’t familiar with, as [Brad Dettmer] did with the ROM from a SNES Zelda cartridge. We’ve seen …read more
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The NES was one of the flagship consoles of the glorious era that was the 1980s. Many of the most popular games on the platform involved some sort of adventure through scrolling screens — Metroid, Super Mario, and Zelda all used this common technique. For many games, keeping track of the map was a huge chore and meant mapping by hand on graph paper or using the screenshots published in Nintendo Power magazine. These day’s there’s a better way. [Daniel] set out to automatically map these huge two-dimensional worlds, developing software he calls WideNES to do it.
WideNES is an …read more
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Just this summer, the Nintendo Entertainment System had its 35th release anniversary, and even after years of discontinuation, it is still going strong in the hacker community. Exhibit A: [Matthew Earl]. For one of his upcoming projects, [Matthew] needed to get his hands on the background images of the NES classic Super Mario Bros. Instead of just getting some ready-rendered images and stitching them together, he decided to take care of the rendering himself, once he extracts the raw game data.
Since there is no official source code available for Super Mario Bros, [Matthew] used a disassembled version to get …read more
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Cardboard is one of the easiest ways to build something physical, far easier than the 3D printing and laser cutting we usually write about here. So when Nintendo released their Labo line of cardboard accessories, it doesn’t take a genius to predict the official product would be followed by a ton of user creations. Nintendo were smart enough to provide not only an internet forum for this creativity to gather, they also hold contests to highlight some of the best works.
The most impressive projects in the winner’s circle combined the one-of-a-kind cardboard creations with custom software written using Toy-Con …read more
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Hack a Day
Released in 1998, the Game Boy camera was a bit ahead of its time. This specialized Game Boy cartridge featured a 128×128 pixel CMOS sensor and took 4-color greyscale photos. The camera even rotated, allowing for selfies years before that word existed.
The fixed lens on this camera meant no zoom was possible. [Bastiaan] decided to address this shortcoming by building a Canon EF Lens Mount. The resulting build looks hilarious, but actually takes some interesting photos.
[Bastiaan] designed the mount using Rhino 3D, and printed it out on a Monoprice 3D printer. After some light disassembly, the mount can …read more
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This is a stellar hack, folks. [Tom7] pulled off both full-motion video and running a Super Nintendo game on a regular old Nintendo with one very cute trick. And he gives his presentation of how he did it on the Nintendo itself — Nintendo Power(point)! The “whats” and the “hows” are explained over the course of two videos, also embedded below.
In the first, he shows it all off and gives you the overview. It’s as simple as this: Nintendo systems store 8×8 pixel blocks of graphics for games on their ROM cartridges, and the running program pulls these up …read more
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If you’ve ever wanted to take a dive into and visualize a game’s code, this could be a seminal example in a literal sense. After twenty-one months of effort, the entire Pokemon Red game is now playable inside Minecraft.
[Mr. Squishy] is the mad genius behind this project, laboriously re-coding the game literally block by block. A texture pack is needed for the specific sprites, but otherwise it is playable without mods. It’s not immediately apparent when loading in to the level, but chip your way through the floor of the stadium and you are confronted by something awe-inspiring: sprawling …read more
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[Dhole], like the fox, isn’t the first to connect his computer to a Game Boy printer but he has done a remarkable job of documenting the process so well that anyone can follow. The operation is described well enough that it isn’t necessary to scrutinize his code, so don’t be put off if C and Rust are not your first choices. The whole thing is written like a story in three chapters.
The first chapter is about hacking a link cable between two Game Boys. First, he explains the necessity and process of setting the speed of his microcontroller, a …read more
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[Christopher Foote] didn’t play quite as many games as he wanted to as a child. After years of catching up using the RetroPie and the PiGRRL 2, it was when he first picked up a Switch’s joy-cons that inspiration struck. Behold: the PiSwitch!
Realizing they operated on Bluetooth tech, [Foote] spent a fair chunk of time getting the joy-cons to properly pair to the Raspberry Pi 3 and function as one controller. Once done, he relied on Linux Joystick Mapper to manage the keybindings with some extra legwork besides to get the analog sticks working properly.
To make this console …read more
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[Dorison Hugo] let us know about a project he just completed that not only mods Nintendo with more Nintendo, but highlights some of the challenges that come from having to work with and around existing hardware. The project is a Gamecube Dock for the Nintendo Switch, complete with working Gamecube controller ports. It looks like a Gamecube with a big slice out of it, into which the Nintendo Switch docks seamlessly. Not only that, but thanks to an embedded adapter, original Gamecube controllers can plug into the ports and work with the Switch. The original orange LED on the top …read more
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[Hailrazer] over on the Made by Bacteria forums was a bit tired of all his consoles cluttering up the space underneath his TV. No worries, though, because it’s actually fairly easy to combine a Gamecube and an N64 into one system that looks very professional. While [Hailrazer]‘s Gamecube was left reasonably complete, not including the addition [...]
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[Jani 'Japala' Pönkkö] found a way to make his old Game Boy Advance exciting again. He poured a ton of time and craftsmanship into building a miniature arcade cabinet. He did such a good job it’s easy to think this is a commercial product. But when you open the back of the case to switch [...]
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For their final project in a microcontrollers course, [Trudy] and [Josh] designed a pair of morse code transceivers. To send the message, they used an array of IR LEDs. The message is received using a Gameboy Color Camera, which takes care of basic image processing. This allows a 8-bit ATMega1284p microcontroller to handle transmitting and [...]
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Hack a Day
We hope our readers are familiar with the vast number of ROM hacks for the original 1st-gen Pokemon games. With certain sequences of button presses, it’s possible to duplicate items in the player’s inventory, get infinite money, or even catch a glimpse of the elusive MissingNo. [bortreb] is familiar with all these hacks, but his [...]
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Hack a Day
[Guillermo Amaral's] NES controller was in great shape. Well, except for the fact that it didn’t work. Upon closer inspection it seems the shift register — which is the only IC on these ancient peripherals — had given up the ghost. But he made it usable again by making the NES controller into a MaKey MaKey [...]
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Hack a Day
With the release of the Wii U last weekend we knew it wouldn’t be long before we saw those glorious gut shots on the Internet. The folks at iFixit have torn down a Wii U, and the insides look somewhat promising for a potential hack to take control of the Wii U Game Pad. The [...]
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With the launch of the Wii U yesterday, we were wondering exactly how long it would take for this new console to be broken wide open allowing for the execution of homebrew code. Technically, it only took a day, as [wraggster] shows us, but the results aren’t what you would expect. Right now, he’s using [...]
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[Mike] is a huge fan of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and now that he has a daughter it’s a great time to pass this epic quest down to the next generation. There’s a problem with explaining the plot to her daughter, though: even though the player can name the character after themselves, [...]
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A few months ago, [Ben] saw a video of the world’s largest NES controller. “I bet I could make the smallest,” he thought in a strange game of one-upmanship. Now [Ben] has the smallest fully functional NES compatible controller, a feat of engineering that can only end in very, very sore thumbs. The old NES controller is a [...]
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Hack a Day
If you look closely you’ll notice there’s nowhere to put the game cartridge on this Super Nintendo system. That’s because this is a Rasberry Pi based SNES emulator that plays ROMs, not cartridges. Since the RPi board is used the only limit to what you can play is the board’s RAM and which ROMs you [...]
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Hack a Day
We’d bet everyone reading this article has played a game on an emulator at some time or another. And you may have a base idea of how those emulators work. But we’d wager the vast majority of you are clueless about the actual implementation of game emulators (we know we are). But that has all [...]
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Hack a Day
This Nintendo light gun, aka Zapper, looks like a stock device. But a peek inside shows that the circuit board has been replaced. [CNLohr] added USB functionality and a few extra sensors that let him write his own games for that use the classic controller. After cracking open the case he measured the shape of [...]
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SecDocs
Authors:
Dong-Joo Ha Ki-Chan Ahn Tags:
Nintendo Event:
AVTokyo 2010 Abstract: A large portion of people who possess a Gaming Console or a Smartphone are downloading paid software illegally from the web or p2p. Most of those people do not even give a second thought before installing the downloaded software, and merely just check that the application works. The sense of security here comes from the application's popularity and the fact that the application is working as advertised with no noticeable problems. The reason why people have this kind of false sense of security for Console Gaming systems or Mobile Devices is because they are not fully aware that malware can potentially bring the same devastating effects as that of a PC malware, and no one has published a reliable way to inject a malware to a legit software. However, the boundry of these devices and the PC is getting very thin due to the evolution of hardware, which makes these devices capable of bringing the same negative effects of PC malware. In this presentation, we will show how to inject code into binary for Nintendo Wii, and show a demo live action.
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[Andres] wrote in to share his USB for NES controller project (translated). It enumerates as a USB keyboard and is easily mapped on most emulators. Over the weekend we looked in on an AVR programmer used for this purpose. [Andres] went a different direction, using a PIC microcontroller and eventually incorporating his circuit into the body [...]
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Hack a Day
The venerable Game Boy is dead – and has been for a long time – after being replaced by the DS, DSi, DSi XL, and the 3DS. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing of value to the old Game Boy catalog; Pokemon Red/Blue is still as much fun as it was 15 years ago, and the [...]
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SecDocs
Authors:
Marcel Klein Mario Manno Tobias Gruetzmacher Tags:
games Nintendo Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 23th (23C3) 2006 Abstract: The Nintendo DS is a mobile gaming console. It was first introduced in 2004. Our talk will give a short introduction of the hardware and available games. The main focus however lies on homebrew software, DSLinux, alternative firmware, copy protection, flash cards and online gaming protocols. The Nintendo DS is often seen as a direct competitor to the Sony PSP, but sells at a much lower price. The DS consists of two ARM CPUs, two displays, one of them functions as a touchscreen and a wifi interface. Due to its small amount of RAM, 4MB, the DS provides a real challenge to developers. We will explain different methods used to circumvent the copy protection and replace the existing firmware. Afterwards we will introduce the most common flash cartridges used to run homebrew software and pirated ROMs. While talking about homebrew applications we will focus on wifi applications, like scanners and development environments. At last we will present an analysis of the online gaming protocols.
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SecDocs
Authors:
Marcel Klein Mario Manno Tobias Gruetzmacher Tags:
games Nintendo Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 23th (23C3) 2006 Abstract: The Nintendo DS is a mobile gaming console. It was first introduced in 2004. Our talk will give a short introduction of the hardware and available games. The main focus however lies on homebrew software, DSLinux, alternative firmware, copy protection, flash cards and online gaming protocols. The Nintendo DS is often seen as a direct competitor to the Sony PSP, but sells at a much lower price. The DS consists of two ARM CPUs, two displays, one of them functions as a touchscreen and a wifi interface. Due to its small amount of RAM, 4MB, the DS provides a real challenge to developers. We will explain different methods used to circumvent the copy protection and replace the existing firmware. Afterwards we will introduce the most common flash cartridges used to run homebrew software and pirated ROMs. While talking about homebrew applications we will focus on wifi applications, like scanners and development environments. At last we will present an analysis of the online gaming protocols.
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21:47
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SecDocs
Authors:
Marcel Klein Mario Manno Tobias Gruetzmacher Tags:
games Nintendo Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 23th (23C3) 2006 Abstract: The Nintendo DS is a mobile gaming console. It was first introduced in 2004. Our talk will give a short introduction of the hardware and available games. The main focus however lies on homebrew software, DSLinux, alternative firmware, copy protection, flash cards and online gaming protocols. The Nintendo DS is often seen as a direct competitor to the Sony PSP, but sells at a much lower price. The DS consists of two ARM CPUs, two displays, one of them functions as a touchscreen and a wifi interface. Due to its small amount of RAM, 4MB, the DS provides a real challenge to developers. We will explain different methods used to circumvent the copy protection and replace the existing firmware. Afterwards we will introduce the most common flash cartridges used to run homebrew software and pirated ROMs. While talking about homebrew applications we will focus on wifi applications, like scanners and development environments. At last we will present an analysis of the online gaming protocols.
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Hack a Day
It seems like [Chris Downing] is always up to something new. If he’s not keeping busy by creating slick portable iterations of previous-gen gaming consoles, he is dreaming up ways to make his modding life a bit easier. Recently while working on a Nintendo controller designed to control three different consoles, [Downing] found his desk buried [...]
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Hack a Day
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer for the Nintendo 64 has a rather interesting feature: by entering the code RRDUAL on the cheats menu, it’s possible to plug two controllers into the console and control each engine independently. This gives the game an awesome arcade feel, but dual-wielding N64 controllers is a bit of a burden. [Clarky] thought it would [...]
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Hack a Day
This USB dongle will let you use your unmodified NES controllers on a computer. That’s because it includes the same socket you’d find on the classic console. The image above shows the prototype. Instead of etching the copper clad board, each trace was milled by hand (presumably with a rotary tool). To the left the [...]
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Hack a Day
This lovely set of wires lets [Florian] connect stock Super Nintendo controllers to his Raspberry Pi. The IDC connector in the upper left plugs into the GPIO header on the RPi rather than going the route of using an intermediary USB converter. The setup lets you connect two controllers at once, so you’ll have no [...]
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Hack a Day
We’ve seen portable N64s before, but none were at the level of [Bungle]‘s oversized N64 controller casemod. Instead of the usual ’sanding Bondo and gluing styrene’ method we’ve seen in other casemods, [Bungle] decided to make a silicone mold with a positive master. Not only did [Bungle] end up with a case indistinguishable from something produced in a factory, [...]
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9:01
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Hack a Day
Twenty years ago, [Downing] would fight with his siblings over who got to watch TV. Obviously, this gave him the idea of putting a television inside his Super Nintendo controller, but at he tender age of 12, [Downing] had neither the experience nor skills to make that happen. Now that he’s older, and much less [...]
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12:01
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Hack a Day
The first month of [WoolyDawg5's] summer break went into building one Nintendo emulator to rule them all. He thinks there’s nothing like playing the games on the original controllers, and we agree with him 100%. Here you can see that the cartridge door on this NES enclosure hides the extra connectors he needs. With that [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
Here’s the guts from [Dext0rb's] Super Nintendo cartridge. It’s easy to pick out the dark-colored board which lets him reflash SNES ROMs via USB. We’ve seen this done a number of times, but this is a much cleaner option than hacks that just add a dead-bug-style memory chip. The board he designed has a double-row [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
[Bacteria] retro console modder extraordinaire, is back at it with a rather massive project. “Unity”(originally Dubbed Alpha Omega), this will be a single unit that can play games from 20 different console systems. It will run from one power supply, have one video output, and strangely enough, one controller. [Chris Downing] was nice enough to [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
[Dustin Evans] wanted to used his original NES controllers to play emulated games. The problem is he didn’t want to alter the classic hardware. His solution was to use the connectors and enclosure from a dead NES to build a Bluetooth translator that works with any NES controller. Here he’s showing the gutted half of [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
One of the really cool things about the Nintendo Wii when it was first introduced was the ability to play GameCube games on it. This made it a no-brainer for a lot of folks to upgrade. But as the heyday of legacy systems fades into history, Nintendo decided this was no longer a selling point and stopped [...]
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8:10
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Hack a Day
After building a few portable gaming systems, [Parker] wanted to try something a little different than the usual sleek plastic builds. He decided to go with a nice wooden classic NES. He started by gutting a NOAC or Nintendo On A Chip. The NOAC has already done most of the miniaturization for him, so he [...]
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4:01
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Hack a Day
Just looking at this little thing makes our hands ache. But [Kirren] did do a great job of building an N64 controller inside a tiny project box. It’s not a mod, but a ground-up build based on a PIC 16F628 microcontroller. It has most of the buttons found on a standard controller, and he assures [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
The controllers that came with the Nintendo 64 don’t exactly measure up to the “Duke” of Xbox fame, but they’re not the smallest in the world either. Made by Bacteria forum member [Bungle] says that his girlfriend has incredibly tiny hands, so he thought he might try trimming some of the fat from an N64 [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
At Hack a Day, we’ve seen dozens of intervalometer builds that open and close a camera shutter remotely. [Luke Skaff] decided to take these builds to the next level by automating a camera’s focus and shutter with a Nintendo DS. [Luke]‘s build is based on the Open Camera Controller project that puts the power of an intervalometer, [...]
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12:01
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Hack a Day
Some of our younger readers will never have experienced this before, but back in the day your video games would slow way down if there were too many moving objects on the screen. The original Castlevania comes to mind, but many will remember the problem while playing the fantastically three-dimensional Super Nintendo game Starfox. [Drakon] [...]
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14:57
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Hack a Day
Here’s one way to really keep the component count low. [David] developed an NES controller that doesn’t use any buttons. The copper clad has been milled to provide a pad which registers a button push based on capacitance. The board has a SIL header at the top, making it easy to plug into the Arduino [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
For those of us who can’t be bothered to dig out or N64 whenever we want to play Ocarina of Time or our NES whenever we get the urge to play Battletoads, emulators are a godsend. There is a problem, though. A keyboard doesn’t provide the right experience as a the classic NES ‘brick’ or the [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
The Queen of Bondo is back again, this time with an adorably small NES portable, the HandyNES. When last saw [lovablechevy], she had just finished up her build of a Nintenduo, a build that stuffed an NES and SNES into a single box. The Nintenduo was such a clean build it would be a crime [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
Make sure your health insurance premiums are all paid up; if you decide to replicate this project you may need it. [Corey], [Kris], and [Jess] built their own go cart which is controlled with a Wii remote. The website has a poor navigation scheme, but if you hover over the horizontal menu bar you can [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
[lovablechevy] loves her Retro Duo console, especially since it takes up less space than the NES and SNES it has replaced. There’s a small problem though: the Retro Duo isn’t 100% compatible with her old Nintendo cartridges. Battletoads is a deal breaker for her, so she built Nintenduo, an NES/SNES console that uses all original Nintendo hardware. [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
[Joel] dug up this hack that he pulled off over ten years ago. It’s inspired by the Nintendo PowerGlove, and uses flex sensors to react to movements of your fingers. The interesting thing is, he built these optical flex sensors himself. He likes to say that this is a ghetto fiber-optic setup. The inlaid diagram [...]
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10:00
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Hack a Day
[Brian Knoll] still uses his Super Nintendo with relative frequency, and he just can’t get enough Super Scope action. If you never owned one, the Super Scope can be a ton of fun, but it’s also an incredible battery hog. It eats through AA batteries by the caseful, so [Brian] wanted to make the switch [...]
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8:25
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Hack a Day
Jailbreaking hacks have come and gone for the Wii, ever changing as Nintendo tweaks their software to prevent homebrew from running. Piracy concerns aside, there is a legitimate Wii homebrew scene, and a new, easy to use tool has been released for those looking to give it a try. Many of the previous jailbreaks relied [...]
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9:56
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Hack a Day
Take a tour of anywhere on earth without leaving your home. This virtual Segway tour uses the Wii Fit Balance Board and Google Earth to let the rider control a virtual tour by leaning in the direction they want to travel. It’s the product of a hackathon at SVI Hackspace, a new hackerspace in Stanford’s [...]
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12:01
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Hack a Day
Standing up to play Dance Dance Revolution type games is sooooo much work. Thankfully, [Jebadiah0001] is taking the strenuous exercise component out of the game by altering a guitar controller to play dancing games. He’s calling it Bass Hero because the DDR games only use four inputs, reducing the guitar controller to four string [...]
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3:42
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Hack a Day
[Dominic] wrote in to share a pretty neat Famicom console mod that improves both the video and audio output of the system. While some of you may be familiar with the PlayChoice 10, we’re guessing that many of you are not. The PlayChoice 10 was an arcade-style machine that allowed you to play up to [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
Here’s a mutlicartridge hack for the original NES that [Callan Brown] put together. He spent some time snooping around the signals on the circuit board seen above until he found the trace that maps the reset signal from the game console. This will be used to cycle through the various games stored on the cart’s [...]
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14:01
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Hack a Day
[Rich] needed to come up with a senior design project and decided to combine two things he loved: his Android phone and Super Nintendo. While touchscreen phones are great, he felt that nothing beats the tactile feedback of a physical controller when it comes to gaming. He figured out how the controller’s signaling works, then [...]
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6:33
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Hack a Day
Sometimes emulators just don’t cut it when you want to play a vintage game. Like it or not, some people enjoy the nostalgia of playing old games on the actual hardware for which it was designed. [Callan] wrote in to share a method he has been using to make some of his own NES game [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
We’ve been following the Retrode since it was an obscure video on YouTube that we swore was an elaborate hoax. Now, [Matthias] tell us it’s getting its third major upgrade, and it is really starting to resemble a commercial project. The video features the new prototype case for the Retrode II, which has been 3d printed. The [...]
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5:03
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Hack a Day
The Nintendo Entertainment System is by far the most popular 8 bit post crash video game system. Therefore, the NES gets all sorts of mods and hacks done with it, but there is not a whole bunch of noise for its bigger badder 16 bit brother the Super Nintendo. Have no fear though [Vigo the [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
Instructables user [dany32412] recently built what is arguably one of the smallest NES consoles we have seen to date. Using a Nintendo on a Chip (NOAC) board, he has fabricated an NES system that fits inside a hollowed out NES cartridge. He purchased a NOAC system at a local resale shop and got to work [...]
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4:09
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Hack a Day
[Doug] over at the moddedbybacteria forums has been working hard on a fantastic looking portable NES console and wrote in to let us know it was complete. The console started as a simple idea to use a Nintendo on a chip (NOAC) board in order to create a portable console that played original NES cartridges. [...]
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9:15
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Hack a Day
Instructables user [Bruno] recently constructed a fun little toy that brings a bit of the Mario nostalgia out of the video game universe and into ours. His Super Mario coin block is instantly recognizable from the first Mario game and performs just as you would expect it to. Punching or tapping the bottom of the [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
The Wiimote is a fantastic tool for hackers, given their affordability and how easy they are to work with. [Gareth] had a “eureka” moment while working on another Wiimote-based project, and with some alterations, converted it into an electronic whiteboard. The whiteboard was built using the IR sensor he extracted from a Wiimote, which is [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
The wireless controller for the Nintendo Wii has been used in many a hack due to its simple to use Bluetooth interface. The nunchuck portion of the controller however, has always required a physical tether to the wireless controller, or an aftermarket wireless dongle. [Rousselmanu] is looking to change that with his Bluetooth-enabled wireless Wii [...]
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4:05
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Hack a Day
As gaming consoles age the controllers will inevitably show some wear, and sadly may give out all together. [Kyle] couldn’t bear to watch his Nintendo 64 controller bite the dust so he replaced the thumb stick with one from a PlayStation. This is a bigger job than you might imagine because the two parts are fundamentally different. [...]
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11:21
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Hack a Day
[Daniel] is making a mini arcade cabinet with an SNES housed inside. He wanted to build an arcade controller for it and chose to construct something from scratch instead of destroying an original piece of hardware. We can almost feel you guys sighing with relief at that one. He sent us some nice photos of [...]
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9:21
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Hack a Day
So you’ve long since mastered Super Mario Bros. and it no longer challenges you? Have you tried playing it from right to left? That’s what Backwards Mario is all about. The first portion of the hack is getting the image to display backwards. He’s working with an old CRT television, which uses a magnetic ring [...]
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6:27
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Hack a Day
[Frode] felt that using the keyboard for gaming on his old IBM XT computer was simply too noisy. He came up with a much quieter way to game by building an XT adapter for an original NES controller. If you haven’t explored the communication protocol used by the NES peripherals this is a great way [...]
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4:58
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Hack a Day
[DeadlyFoez] wanted to know when the SD card in his Nintendo Wii was in use. He built and indicator LED using a PICAXE 08M and added it next to the SD slot. He uses one pin of the microcontroller to monitor the voltage on one pin of the SD card slot. That pin has a [...]
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11:50
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Hack a Day
Add some feedback to an original NES controller by making it vibrate. This feature is often known as Rumble Pak, a controller add-on for the Nintendo 64 which vibrated as a game feature. This version adds a small DC motor (in the upper right) with a screw soldered off-center to the motor shaft. [Andy Goetz] [...]
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11:45
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Hack a Day
What a beautiful image of NES cartridges showing their private parts. These are the raw materials for the Munchausen Flash Cartridge project. A combination of a modified game cartridge and special USB cable makes it possible to program NES cartridges while inside an unmodified console. The cartridge has an added flash chip that is running [...]
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8:37
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Hack a Day
Having experienced quite a bit of trouble getting the Nintendo Wii remotes to work reliably with his home theater projector, [Sprite_TM] designed his own sensor bar replacement. If you’re not familiar, the Wii remotes have an infrared camera in the tip that sense two IR LEDs in the sensor bar that resides above or below [...]
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7:47
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Hack a Day
[Mr.X] added support for four controllers to his Super Nintendo (Google translated) by internalizing the multi-player adapter. In the video after the break you’ll notice that he also added some bling to the case by positioning the power LED beneath the logo and adding a two-digit display. There is a switch on the back that [...]
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12:00
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Hack a Day
Regular Hackaday reader [Osgeld] is at it again with this USB conversion for an NES controller. This is a ubiquitous hack that we started seeing very early on, sometimes involving an adapter kit, and other times including things like a thumb drive and USB hub. But this time around is truly a bare-bones version. He’s using [...]
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9:31
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Hack a Day
These aren’t terrorists, they’re electrical engineering students. For their final project they developed a headband and rifle input system for the NES. The controllers send data to a laptop which then maps out the inputs to NES controller commands and sends them to an original NES console, no emulation here. The controllers in the headband [...]
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12:00
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Hack a Day
This bright red handheld is [Bacteria's] portable N64 console. We’re beginning to feel a bit saturated with N64 portable hacks, having seen one that looks like a Game Boy, another in a shiny black case, and yet another in a white case. This time around it’s not just the end product, but [Bacteria] has posted [...]
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10:00
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Hack a Day
The continuing battle for smallest console-made-portable continues with this N64 portable hack. Unlike the last two that we saw, this version opts for an over-under rather than side-by-side control scheme. This results in a small overall size, but because this thing is a thick brick we wonder if playing for hours would just leave you [...]
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6:42
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Hack a Day
This cool mod brings force feedback to the Nintendo DS. There’s a motor with an offset weight mounted inside the DS for vibration and some nice SMD LEDs plopped in there for good measure. The force feedback is being controlled via a picaxe mocrocontroller and triggered from the analog audio signal. While using the analog [...]
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11:48
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Hack a Day
As we posted about [Atarity]’s XBMC hiding in an SNES controller, we were finishing work on a tutorial for [Adafruit]. The tutorial combines a Teensy USB development board with a 3D accelerometer inside of an SNES controller. The Teensy is programmed to poll the SNES controller buttons and read the accelerometer values. The buttons are [...]
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8:33
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Hack a Day
[Hounjini] was poking around at the Game Boy Advanced bus of his Nintendo DS lite and figured out how to use it to connect an Arduino to the DS. For testing he’s soldered an IDC plug to the cartridge cover pin interface but this only requires four connections. The Arduino can both send and receive [...]
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11:27
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Hack a Day
There’s a warm place in our hearts for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s too bad we don’t have that hardware sitting around anymore. But if you do there’s a chance it needs some TLC and there’s always room for a blue LED mod. [Raph] has a wonderful collection of NES hardware repairs and hacks [...]
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12:43
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Hack a Day
[Segher] has reverse engineered the hardware and command set for the NES CIC chips. These chips make up the security hardware that validates a cartridge to make sure it has been licensed by Nintendo. Only after authentication will the console’s CIC chip stop reseting the hardware at 1 Hz. The was no hardware information available [...]
