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-replacean 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)

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Paul McGuinness sent us a few more Blackjack hacks today, some of which are particular to the device, and some that apply to Smartphones and Pocket PCs in general. My favorite, though, is getting an NES emulator running on the device.

I've played with the PocketNester NES emulator on my PPC quite a bit. You just download the PPC ARM installer from the SourceForge site, run the installer when you are connected to ActiveSync, and copy some ROMs over to play. It's painless on the PPC, but it won't install on the Smartphone.

I haven't been able to test them, but there are a number of alternative PocketNester ports floating around, including PocketNesterPlus which is said to run correctly on the landscape/widescreen Smartphones. I've linked to what I could find. Hopefully one of them will get you up and running on your particular device.

While you're checking this out, you're going to need to find some ROMs to play. Instead of just downloading a bunch of old Nintendo ROMs, I always get a kick out of trying homebrew NES apps. The game pictured above is called Grave Digger, and it's an addictive (maybe twisted) take on the old computer science "game of life" cellular automaton. The goal is to dig up all the zombies, but every time you dig, the adjacent graves will toggle between exhumed or filled.

The reason I mention Grave Digger is that it was written in 2004 as part of Bob Rost's game development class at Carnegie Mellon. If you start to get into playing retro Nintendo games, it might be worth taking the next step and taking a swing at writing one. The CMU lectures, tests, and a nice collection of NES homebrew resources are available on Bob Rost's site (as well as a few cool game ROMs). It's definately worth checking out.

References:

• Original PocketNester (PPC portrait @ sourceforge - I've tested this one) - Link
• PocketNester (for qvga SP @ surrealnetworks) - Link
• PocketNesterPlus (for landscape SP @ surrealnetworks) - Link
• PocketNesterPlus @ modaco forums (most recent? download appears to be corrupt right now) - Link
• Samsung Blackjack Hacks Wiki - [via] Link
• Game Development for the 8-bit NES - Link

Like many people who grew up in the glory days of home computing, I spent a lot of my high school and college years playing the Ultima series of games. The series stood out in a lot of ways, but one of the most memorable things about it was that the creator of the series, Richard Garriott, projected himself into the game as "Lord British", the wise (generally--I'm recalling that one time he got stuck in the underworld) and (always) benevolent ruler of Sosaria, and eventually, Britannia. When we heard news that Lord British was in possession of the backup Sputnik, some of us briefly entertained the idea of "borrowing" the Sputnik while in Austin for Maker Faire, but then we remembered that Lord British has a bunch of powerful guards (see the above video if you don't believe me), and plus, WWtAD (What Would the Avatar Do)?

Texas Man Linked to Past and Future of Space Exploration by Sputnik and Soyuz - Link

Related

• Retro Gaming Hacks - Link
• Maker Faire Austin - Link
• Mac OS X version of Ultima III (pictured above, with the Apple ][ tileset) - Link
• Ultima IV remake for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X - Link

NES.app is a full blown Nintendo emulator for the iPhone. It supports the device's multitouch interface, so you can use the virtual on-screen game pad with your thumbs, just like the Nintendo gods intended.

NES.app uses a heavily modified version of the InfoNES emulation core to mimic the 6502 processor in a Nintendo Entertainment System, allowing you to play ROM dumps of games designed for the NES console.

NES.app started as a fork of iPhoneNES v0.01, but has been completely rewritten to run very fast, and with many additional features including sound, multitouch support, full-screen, landscape mode, game genie codes, saved games and much more.

It's supposed to run pretty well, but if you're using game genie codes or a more graphically demanding title, there's a frame-drop feature... It'll still play realtime, but just a bit choppier.

What I'm really excited about, though, is the state saving ability, which allows you to stop a game mid-play and then start it again from that point at a later time. I could never beat Contra even after resorting to some "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, b, a, select, start" business, and my Super Mario skills have always been wanting, so maybe this is my chance to regain some 1980s self respect.

NES.app: The Nintendo Emulator for iPhone - Link

An image I saw in Phil Dangler's photostream clued me into this awesome application:

This Atari 2600 Label Maker produces authentic looking Atari 2600 "Picture Labels" using your own image and title.

The "Picture Label" is the most common Atari 2600 label and features a large image on a black background. The game title is always in upper case but varies in color.

(Pictured is the artwork from the Brain Machine article in Make 10). Atari 2600 Label Maker - Link

racketboy has a great roundup of NES console options. These include Nintendo Entertainment System work-alikes. You should be able to plug most of your old 8-bit game cartridges right into one of these and be up and running right away:

I received a friendly email the other day asking what NES clone I would recommend. While I have talked about all of the major players in the past, I haven't actually owned any myself, nor had I done enough research to give a reliable answer. Also, I thought it would be nice if I produced a detailed article to present to him and share with future shoppers instead of a quick response. Below, you will find the results of my research of both NES clones and Nintendo's two official console releases. I've tried to summarize all my findings in an easy to digest manner and everything is pulled from a variety of reviews and conversations about each machine. If you would like to add your own experiences, feel free to use the comments section below.

Finding The Best NES Clone or Official Console For You - Link

Related:

• Retro Gaming Hacks - Link
  

Related

• Play MS-DOS Games on Vista - Link
  
• Retro Gaming Hacks - Link
  

Every now and then, I dust off one of the many classic games I never finished and give it another go. This time it's Baldur's Gate II. Every time I do this, I have to deal with the "Insert Your Play Disc" hassle. I don't mind this when it's my desktop computer, but on my notebook, I don't want to get all worked up for a big battle only to find that the disc I need is sitting on a shelf back at home.

The usual solution to this is to find a "NoCD" crack for the game, but this means I'm downloading an executable from an unknown source. If it has a trojan or some other kind of malware in it, I won't find out until too late.

So when I searched for the Baldur's Gate II NoCD crack, I got a little more aggressive and looked for a patch I could apply myself. In this case, it was pretty easy, thanks to a simple patch based on Softbeard's work, and published by Shea Kauffman:

File: BGMAIN.EXE
Change bytes (all numbers in hex):
  Find  0F84DA08
after these numbers should be
  00006a006a008b
Change them to
  0000e9ee030000

To apply this patch, I used ICY Hexplorer (pictured above) to patch the file. (You should always back up the file you're patching first, just in case you mess something up.) And be sure to verify that the patch applies to the exact version of the game that you have (patch 26498 in my case).

If you can't find a manual patch like this one, you can at least use ICY Hexplorer to take a peek at what modifications have been made to the altered version of the game you want to run. Open both .exe files in ICY and choose File->Export->Ascii Hex, then compare the output using a command-line utility like diff or fc. You probably won't understand the change, but if the magnitude of the change is pretty small, then you can at least be confident that there isn't some kind of massive payload lurking in the crack:

C:\Documents and Settings\bjepson\Desktop>fc before.txt after.txt
Comparing files before and AFTER.TXT
***** before.txt
B7 00 FF 92 94 00 00 00 8B 85 B8 FE FF FF 83 B8
3C 01 00 00 00 0F 84 DA 08 00 00 6A 00 6A 00 8B
0D CC 73 B7 00 E8 65 59 CA FF 25 FF 00 00 00 85
***** AFTER.TXT
B7 00 FF 92 94 00 00 00 8B 85 B8 FE FF FF 83 B8
3C 01 00 00 00 0F 84 DA 08 00 00 E9 EE 03 00 00
0D CC 73 B7 00 E8 65 59 CA FF 25 FF 00 00 00 85
*****

I wish I didn't have to do this; I think it would be reasonable to expect game makers to release a patch late in the game's life cycle that eliminates the CD check. I can excuse it for the first few months of a game's life, but after that, how much does it help? IIRC, some of the first-person shooters I've played in recent years have eliminated the CD check by the second or third patch. I think that's a better way to go.

Related:

• Retro Gaming Hacks - Link
  
• Gaming Hacks - Link
  
• ICY Hexplorer - Link
  

• Speed up the dynamic cpu core (certain games get much faster).
  
• Add a dynamic fpu on x86 hosts.
  
• Improve the cycle guessing code (and make it default).
  
• Better and more configurable joystick support.
  
• Improve the image and fat drives.
  
• Add nullmodem emulation.
  
• Various win 3.x enhanchments (video/audio/ems/win32s).
  
• Improve CDROM detection and support.
  
• Speed up the screen drawing code.
  
• Add support for different keyboard layouts.
  
• Various fixes to the (C/E/V)GA emulation.
  
• Extend and improve all types of emulated memory. (umb/ems/xms)
  
• Dynamic core should work on Intel Macs.
  
• Various timer related fixes.
  
• Added a few more graphic scalers.
  

Related

• Llamatron for DOS (pictured) - Link
  
• Classic DOS Games - Link
  
• Retro Gaming Hacks - Link
  

Stella for Windows CE recently added support for some of the newer Windows Mobile smartphones, including QVGA devices like the T-Mobile Dash. This screencast shows how to set it up. - Link to video download.

Related:

• Stella: "A multi-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator" - Link
• Buy the Rainbow Invaders Cartridge - Link
• Rainbow Invaders - Link
• Retro Gaming Hacks - Link

racketboy has posted a tutorial that shows you how to cram more than one Dreamcast game onto a CD:

I've been cleaning up the files on my PC, including a number of useful text files. Among these files is a tutorial that I picked up a while back that let people put multiple Dreamcast games on a single CD-R. This can be pretty helpful if you want to put a few of your favorite games on one disc to reduce disc swapping. Of course, to be fully legal, you should own the original copies of the games in question, but this makes a handy backup solution.

I haven't tried this myself, but it looks very useful for preserving your collection of games. Link

Related:

• Retro Gaming Hacks - Link
• Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works (see section 2) - Link

If you try to run an old DOS game on Vista, you'll probably get an error "This system does not support fullscreen mode." Fortunately, this isn't a dead end. Download a copy of DOSBox, the greatest MS-DOS emulator for any platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and more), and try running your game under DOSBox. Not only will you get support for old-school graphics like CGA and EGA, you can even run it in a window!

Related

• Retro Gaming Hacks
  
• Sopwith
  
• List of DOS Games on Wikipedia