Collaborate Disseminate
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
By now, most of us have had some experience getting ROMs from classic video games to run on new hardware. Whether that’s just on a personal computer with the keyboard as a controller, or if it’s a more refined RetrioPie in a custom-built cabinet, it has become relatively mainstream. What isn’t mainstream, however, is building custom hardware that can run classic video games on the original console (translated). The finished project looks amazing, but the prototype blows us away with it’s beauty and complexity.
[phanick]’s project is a cartridge that is able to run games on the Polish Famicon clone …read more
Continue reading FPGA Emulates NES Cart; Prototype So Cyberpunk
What’s the quickest way to turn one game into 2,400? Cram a Raspberry Pi Zero running RetroPie into an NES cartridge and call it Pi Cart.
This elegant little build requires no soldering — provided you have good cable management skills and the right parts. To this end, [Zach] remarks that finding a USB adapter — the other main component — small enough to fit inside the cartridge required tedious trial and error, so he’s helpfully linked one he assures will work. One could skip this step, but the potential for couch co-op is probably worth the effort.
Another sticking …read more
If you’ve ever fired a potato cannon, you’ll know that they are a raucous good time, but are somewhat clumsy to reload after each shot. Seeing an opportunity to improve on the design and minimize the delay between launches, [Danger First] have concocted a fast reloading potato cannon — or should I say — Potowitzer.
The key here is that they’ve gone through the extra effort of designing and building honest-to-goodness artillery rounds for their Potowitzer’s manual breech-loading mechanism. Foregoing the inconsistency of potatoes, they’ve 3D printed a bevy of bullets and sealed them with propane gas into PVC pipe …read more
Most video game manufacturers aren’t too keen on homebrew games, or people trying to get more utility out of a video game system than it was designed to have. While some effort is made to keep people from slapping a modchip on an Xbox or from running an emulator for a Playstation, it’s almost completely impossible to stop some of the hardware hacking that is common on older cartridge-based games. The only limit is usually the cost of an EPROM programmer, but [Robson] has that covered now with his Arduino-based SNES EPROM programmer.
Normally this type of hack involves finding …read more
