Collaborate Disseminate
In August 2000, Tiger Electronics released HitClips: Music cartridges and players designed to easily share 60 second low quality Clips of a youngster’s favorite Hits. Various players were available, and …read more Continue reading HitClips Custom Cartridge Hack Will Never Give Up, Let Down, Or Turn Around
Over the years we’ve seen plenty of homebrew handheld game systems that combine an AVR microcontroller, a few buttons, and an small OLED display. We’ve even seen some of them …read more Continue reading DIY Handheld Game Puts its Brains on a Removable Cart
Has it really come to this? Are we really at the point that dishwashers have proprietary detergent cartridges that you’re locked into buying at inflated prices? Apparently so, at least …read more Continue reading Detergent DRM Defeated on Diminutive Dishwasher
For viewers of sci-fi TV and films from the 1960s onwards, the miniaturisation of computer hardware has been something of a disappointment. Yes, it’s amazing that we can get 1.21 …read more Continue reading It’s Not A Computer If It Doesn’t Have A Cartridge Slot
At its core, the RetroArch project exists to make it easier to play classic games on more modern hardware. The streamlined front-end with its tailored collection of emulators helps take the confusion out of getting your favorite game from decades …read more
Continue reading RetroArch Open Hardware Aims for Plug-and-Play
The original Game Boy was a smash success for Nintendo and has an amazing collection of games. You might relive some childhood nostalgia by booting up a Game Boy emulator, but to really get the full experience you’ll need the battery-draining green-tinted original hardware. Thanks to modern technology you can …read more
Doom was a breakthrough game for its time, and became so popular that now it’s essentially the “Banana For Scale” of hardware hacking. Doom has been ported to countless devices, most of which have enough processing ability to run the game natively. Recently, this lineup of Doom-compatible devices expanded to …read more
The ArduBoy, as you might have guessed from the name, was designed as a love letter to the Nintendo Game Boy that many a hacker spent their formative years squinting at. While the open source handheld is far smaller than the classic DMG-01, it retains the same general form factor, …read more
Continue reading The ArduBoy Community Rolled Their Own Cartridge
There’s something powerful about reliving the experience of using a game console from our personal good old days, especially the tactile memories stored up from hundreds of hours handling a chintzy joystick or the sound and feel of inserting a game cartridge. Emulators have their place, but they fall far short of period-correct hardware in the nostalgia department.
That’s not to say that the retro gear can’t use a little help in terms of usability, which is why [Scott M. Baker] built this Raspberry Pi multi-cartridge for his Atari 5200. The idea is to maintain the experience of the cartridge …read more
Continue reading Dual-Port Memory And Raspberry Pi Team Up For Retro Console Multicart
The venerable Commodore 64, is there anything it can’t do? Like many 1980s computer platforms, direct access to memory and peripherals makes hacking easy and fun. In particular, you’ll find serial & parallel ports are ripe for experimentation, but the Commodore has its expansion/cartridge port, too, and [Frank Buss] decided to hook it up to a two-line character LCD.
Using the expansion port for this duty is a little unconventional. Unlike the parallel port, the expansion port doesn’t have a stable output, as such. The port contains the data lines of the 6510 CPU and thus updates whenever RAM is …read more
