Hackszine.com: Retro Gaming Archives

Archive: Retro Gaming

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October 9, 2008

Repairing a Vectrex using CPLDs

Para JVE

This is amazing; it's an article from Programmable Logic DesignLine that describes how you can repair an old gaming system by using programmable logic (in the form of a Xilinx CPLD) to emulate ~~a hard-to-replace~~an obsolete (actually 35 cents each as Kyoorius points out in the comments, but assumed obsolete "for the sake of this project") chip. The author, In Choi, has a great justification for doing this project:

You may be wondering why I did this exercise. Wouldn't it have been easier to buy a video game console from this or even the last decade? I didn't do the design simply to restore the video game - I did it for a number of reasons.
First off, I think logic design is fun (and I'm lucky enough to get paid to do it). Second, I wanted to show that I could create the RLD [retro logic device] to directly replace a failed part. But my main reason for doing the project was to create a methodology with an FPGA to show that there are indeed practical ways to overcome chip obsolescence.

Replacing obsolete video game circuits with Xilinx CPLDs [via Andrew Plumb on twitter]

(Pictured above, a screenshot from the cross-platform ParaJVE Vectrex emulator)

October 2, 2008

2008 Interactive Fiction competition entries available

Absolute Worst

The 2008 Interactive Fiction competition is up and running, and you can download the games and vote:

For the last fourteen years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for newcomers to the genre, the competition is a chance to enjoy some of the best short adventure games available anywhere.

The 14th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition
via Grand Text Auto

Gaming Hacks
It doesn't take long for an avid or just wickedly clever gamer to be chafed by the limitations of videogame software or hardware. If you want to go far beyond the obvious, there's an awful lot of free fun you can have, using the creative exploits of the gaming gurus. Gaming Hacks is the indispensable guide to cool things gamers can do to create, modify, and hack videogame hardware and software.

Retro Gaming Hacks
Whether you're just discovering Tetris or you've been a Pong junkie since puberty, Chris Kohler's Retro Gaming Hacks is your indispensable new guide to classic games. Kohler has compiled the how-to information that used to take weeks of web surfing to find and presents it in highly readable Hacks style.

August 25, 2008

Wii Physics

Wii Physics is a clever little homebrew app. You use the Wiimote to rotate, size and place objects on a stage. Pulleys, ropes, gears and joints can be used to connect objects together, and when you press the play button, a 2D physics system is turned on, causing the objects to fall and interact with each other.

You can download this for free and run it from the Homebrew Channel. If you're ambitious, you can also download the source, add new features, or base a new game off of it. It's written using libwiisprite, a library you'll want to check out if you're thinking of doing any 2D game dev for the Wii.

Wii Physics
libwiisprite

August 11, 2008

Super Mario World and quantum physics

You may recall a post last month about Kaizo Mario, the ridiculously cruel fan-made Super Mario World level. Hackszine reader Guy Russell sent us a link to an article on the Mechanically Seperated Meat blog that uses this level to visually illustrate the concept of the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum physics.

One good example of this is the Quantum Suicide "experiment" that some proponents of the Many-Worlds Interpretation claim (I think jokingly) could actually be used to test the MWI. The way it works is, you basically run the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment on yourself- you set up an apparatus whereby an atom has a 50% chance of decaying each second, and there's a detector which waits for the atom to decay. When the detector goes off, it triggers a gun, which shoots you in the head and kills you. So all you have to do is set up this experiment, and sit in front of it for awhile. If after sixty seconds you find you are still alive, then the many-worlds interpretation is true, because there is only about a one in 10¹⁸ chance of surviving in front of the Quantum Suicide machine for a full minute, so the only plausible explanation for your survival is that the MWI is true and you just happen to be the one universe where the atom's 50% chance of decay turned up "no" sixty times in a row. Now, given, in order to do this, you had to create about 10¹⁸ universes where the Quantum Suicide machine did kill you, or copies of you, and your one surviving consciousness doesn't have any way of telling the people in the other 10¹⁸ universes that you survived and MWI is true. This is, of course, roughly as silly as the thing about there being a universe where all the atoms in your heart randomly decided to tunnel out of your body.

But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there's a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator's save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.

To create the many-worlds video, the author hacked together a custom version of the SNES9X emulator. The application, which you can download in source or binary form, allows you to record the hundreds retry attempts you make through a level. It then compiles all of the attempts into a single Quicktime video that represents all of Mario's potential histories.

Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics
Previously: Cruel Super Mario World hack

August 10, 2008

Run homebrew games on the PSP Slim

Gizmodo has a detailed walkthrough that guides you through the process of getting homebrew apps running on the PSP Slim (or any PSP, really). They skip the whole step of enabling service mode on your battery, since there are some cheap service mode batteries available for $25 that will save you the effort.

When you've completed the walkthrough, you'll have the latest hacked firmware installed which will allow you to run homebrew apps designed for the PSP, as well as any old PS1 games that you own and care to rip.

How To Hack Your PSP Slim For Homebrew Apps

July 12, 2008

Cruel Super Mario World hack

Kaizo Mario is a homebrew level for Super Mario World that's equal parts evil and genius. My tolerance for frustration isn't nearly high enough to be able to handle this, but for those of you looking for a gaming challenge, there's a link to the ROM below.

You can make your own custom levels for Super Mario World with a graphical level editor called Lunar Magic. You'll need a Windows PC and the original SNES Super Mario World ROM to use it. If you come up with anything you'd like to share, please add it to the comments.

Kaizo Mario Download
Lunar Magic: Super Mario Wolrd Level Editor

April 18, 2008

Tresling - arm wrestling game controller

Meet Tresling, a newfangled competitive sport which combines the physical challenge of arm wrestling with the mental intensity of Tetris. This video has been making the rounds. It's so over the top, I can't help but appreciate it:

The site is scant on details, but as far as I know, this represents the first arm-wrestling human computer interface. The NES brought us guns and running pads. The Wiimote a tennis racket, fishing pole, and boxing glove. If you can get past the initial craziness of Tresling, it's actually an interesting hack in that it's a completely new category of game play made possible by a clever homebrew controller.

Tresling: Arm Wrestling + Tetris

April 16, 2008

HOWTO - fix a broken NES

If blowing on the Metroid cart and shimmying it carefully into the system isn't working for you anymore, don't start looking to replace your old NES just yet. Retro Gaming Hacks author, Chris Kohler, published this video howto on repairing an old NES.

The 72 pin connector that the game cartridges plug into are notorious for becoming corroded and eventually failing. Thankfully, you can pick up a new connector for a few dollars and replace it easily using a phillips head screwdriver.

How to Fix Your Broken NES
Retro Gaming Hacks

April 14, 2008

Second Life on an Apple II

InexorableTash wrote an Apple II program in assembly that receives streaming video from a Windows PC over a 115kbps serial connection. Why? So his nautilus avatar could wander about in Second Life on hardware:

For another fun example of new software on the Apple II, check out this video of a Wolfenstein-like game called "Escape from the Homebrew Computer Club 3D". In this game, the Apple is doing all the work, no external PC needed:

Some people might say that this sort of stuff has no real practical purpose, but it seems to me it's an important tribute to personal computing history. It puts the last 30 years of technology in perspective.

I can't help but wonder about what we've got in store for ourselves in the next 30.

Second Life on an Apple II [via BoingBoing]
Escape from the Homebrew Computer Club 3D

March 27, 2008

Shredz64: Guitar Hero for C64

Toni Westbrook authored a new C64 game called Shredz64, bringing the best game of all time to the best computing platform of all time:

You can use the real Guitar Hero controller using the PSX64 PS2-to-DB9 converter which Toni also created. This takes the game controller input and maps it to the appropriate up, down, left, right and potentiometer lines for the Commodore.

Shredz64 uses the internal SID audio processor to play any of your favorite SID tunes. In addition to the built-in songs, you can import new SID files and even create new levels by editing note tracks (using the game controller, naturally).

I'm speechless.

Shredz64

March 11, 2008

N64 emulation: better than the real thing

Racketboy has a great article showing off some of the capabilities of the modern N64 emulator. If your machine is fast enough, most of the available emulators will really give you a noticeable resolution boost and better looking anti-aliased models. Using the Rice Video plugin with the Project64 emulator, you can even swap out the textures for some games with user-created texture packs.

I still use the real hardware (is the N64 considered "retro" now?), so before seeing this, I hadn't even considered emulation for this platform. That all changed when I saw the Mario64 mod shown above. The selection of available emulators is impressive, and there are open source emulators available for just about every platform. I'm currently playing a game under Mupen64 on my iMac and it's pretty flawless. My only wish is that all computers came, by default, with a nice joystick like they did back in the 80s.

Enhance N64 Graphics With Emulation Plugins & Texture Packs - Link
Project64 Emulator - Link
Rice Video Plugin - Link
Mupen64 Emulator (cross-platform, open source) - Link

February 16, 2008

Vector MAME

There's a special place reserved in my digital heart for the classic arcades like Tempest and Asteroids, and ironically it's because of the flawless analog goodness of their vector-based displays. I still boot up a Tempest emulator for the Dreamcast from time to time, though while it remains fun to play, it just has no soul on a standard CRT.

There was a post on MAKE a couple months ago about a guy named James Brown who hacked a driver for MAME that displays on an oscilloscope via a soundcard's analog output. Unfortunately, aside from photos, videos and a Gizmodo interview, I don't believe drivers or a howto ever turned up for this.

I spoke with the Google about this subject today, and I came across the VectorMAME and the Zector Vector Generator (ZVG):

There were more than 30 vector based games made in the 80's. To acquire a collection that includes all these games would be a monumental feat. Just to find that many vector monitors alone would be no easy task, not to mention the cost! Vector based arcade monitors haven't been made in 20+ years, and you can't simply use one vector monitor for all these games. Each monitor has different specs and runs at different speeds, making them incompatible between different gaming hardware. The hardware was unique for most of these games, making Multigame conversion kits difficult to design. And good luck finding an Aztarac, Sundance, 4-Player Eliminator, or one of our namesake, a Zektor cabinet! Some games are rare enough that even lots of money can't get you one!
After collecting vector games for years, the realization that you can never have them all sank in, and we looked for an alternative. Why not build a Vector Generator that would somehow attach to a standard PC and run all the games supported by an emulator, such as MAME, on a single vector monitor? It would be kind of a 30+ Vector Multigame!

The ZVG connects to your PC via parallel port, and Zector claims it is able to drive most old analog vector monitors that you are able to obtain. It's even able to drive an oscilloscope in X/Y mode. VectorMAME provides the ZVG drivers for DosMAME, which would allow you to put together a MAME cabinet that will play all of the old vector games on a real X/Y monitor. The hardware will set you back a couple hundred bucks, but it appears that this might be the only way to play some of your old favorites in all their glory.

Does anyone know if soundcard-oscilloscope drivers ever became available? It's not as fun as a full 19-inch monitor, but I'm surprised that this hack hasn't been released or recreated at this point.

Zector Vector Generator and VectorMAME - Link
MAME on an Oscilloscope: James Brown Interview - Link

January 12, 2008

Micropolis: Sim City open sourced

Don Hopkins has released a GPLed version of the original Sim City, cleaned up and renamed to the original title, Micropolis:

The "MicropolisCore" project includes the latest Micropolis (SimCity) source code, cleaned up and recast into C++ classes, integrated into Python, using the wonderful SWIG interface generator tool. It also includes a Cairo based TileEngine, and a cellular automata machine CellEngine, which are independent but can be plugged together, so the tile engine can display cellular automata cells as well as SimCity tiles, or any other application's tiles.
The key thing here is to peek inside the mind of the original Maxis programmers when they built it. Remember, this was back in the day when games had to fit inside of 640k so some "creative" programming techniques were employed. SimCity has been long a model used for urban planning and while it's just a game, there are a lot of business rules, ecosystem modeling, social dependencies, and other cool stuff going on in this codebase. It may not be pretty code but it's content sure is interesting to see.

The source will compile for X86/Linux systems, and I'm betting we'll see ports to other platforms at some point. If you're on a Mac and just want to play the game, just run a copy of Ubuntu in an emulator like QEMU and install the binary there.

SimCity Source Code Released to the Wild - [via] Link
Micropolis Downloads - Link

December 5, 2007

HOWTO make your own arcade controls

bbum has posted a great howto on building an arcade controller. His inspiration was a control deck he built many years ago:

I call it the Ghetto Control Deck because the wood was found in an alley near my house (construction waste). I tore apart a broken (bad button) PlayStation One controller and used it as the brains of the controller.

...

Now — more than ten years after it was built — MAME is all the rage and Dave Dribin has produced an awesome port of MAME to Mac OS X. As well, USB technology has evolved such that “HID Compliant” devices are fairly common and cheap. That plus some awesome work in MAME OS X means that plugging in any HID compliant game controller “just works”.

OK — mash it all up now. Not surprisingly, there are simple devices that will enable a PlayStation I or II controller to be plugged into the USB port of your computer. Better yet, if the converter is HID compliant, no drivers are necessary and it’ll just work with software like MAME OS X.

His design even uses phone jacks so you can easily reconfigure it on the fly. He's got a complete HOWTO over at his blog - Link

October 21, 2007

DSMidiWifi - Nintendo DS wireless MIDI controller

The DS Music Interface (DSMI) is a collection of tools that will allow you to use one or more DS devices as wireless MIDI controllers. Using the touchpad on your DS, you can control a MIDI capable music instrument or MIDI-driven visualization software. Using DSMI, the DS can also receive MIDI events. This can be used to drive the built-in Gameboy sound generator, or as control input in your homebrew applications.

The Nintendo DS hardware offers a variety of possibilities for creating music as well as interacting with music. TheRain first had the idea of using the DS as a MIDI controller and created the DSMIDI, a DS cartridge that adds a standard MIDI port to the DS that can be used by homebrew DS software.
But since making a DSMIDI requires soldering skills and is rather dangerous, we came up with another idea: Using the DS as a wireless MIDI controller. The MIDI signals are sent to the computer via Wifi, and a server program forwards them to MIDI applications.

Later, support for natrium42's, DSerial was added, enabling MIDI input and output via standard oldskool MIDI cables.

The project's primary applications are a touchscreen-based keyboard and a 2d "Kaos" pad. These are built using the included libdsmi library, which you can use to add MIDI controller or MIDI client capabilities to your own homebrew DS apps.

Wireless and wired MIDI for the Nintendo DS - Link

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