Collaborate Disseminate
This year, the Supercon badge goes analog! (Or at least fakes it pretty convincingly.) Taking inspiration from the phosphor scopes of yesteryear, the 2023 Vectorscope badge is part analog audio …read more Continue reading 2023 Hackaday Supercon Badge: Welcome to the Vectorscope
Sometimes the simplest of projects end up revealing the most interesting of things, as for example is the case with [Ryo Mukai]’s light pen for the Vectrex console. It’s an …read more Continue reading Vectrex Light Pen Works Without a Raster
If you’ve been reading Hackaday long enough, you’ve probably come across a few hacks where someone made simple animations or even video games on an analog oscilloscope screen. Those hacks …read more Continue reading Color Vector Display Controller Brings Arcade Classics Back to Life
There are some times when an awesome project comes into your feed, but a language barrier intervenes as you try to follow its creator’s description. [Kanti Sharma]’s laser display appears …read more Continue reading A Laser Display Board Of Your Very Own
From the perspective of a later decade it’s sometimes quaint and amusing to look back at the technological objects of desire from times past. In the 1980s for example a handheld television was the pinnacle of achievement, in a decade …read more
Continue reading The Sony ScopeMan, Possibly The Best Product They Never Made
The vintage Macintosh all-in-one computers were a design icon, as well as being highly useful machines in the 80s and 90s. In the decades since, they’ve been used for everything from web servers to aquariums, but that’s not all. [Arcade Jason] decided to grab an old Macintosh Plus and turn …read more
Asteroids is one of the classic games of the early arcade era. Launched in 1979 by Atari, it relied upon using an XY vector monitor to deliver crisp graphics for its space-based gameplay. One of the limitations of the original arcade games was that the game was only rendered in a single colour, white. Over 30 years later, [Arcade Jason] decided to see what it would take to build a color Asteroids machine.
The hack relies on the fact that the original game used a four-bit resistor ladder DAC to draw vectors in different intensity levels. Through some ingeniously simple …read more
Remember the Psion? Back when PDAs were a thing, the Psion was the best you could get. It was, effectively, a palm-top computer with a real qwerty keyboard. It didn’t have Bluetooth, it couldn’t browse the web, and it didn’t have WiFi, but this was an AA-powered productivity machine that could fit in your pocket. Now there’s a new palmtop from Psion engineers. The Gemini PDA is basically a smartphone with a real keyboard that runs Ubuntu. It’s also has a smaller battery than other devices with this form factor, meaning the TSA thinks it’s a smartphone. This thing is …read more
The Vectrex is in no way the most popular console of all time, but it is one of the more unique. Eschewing typical raster-based rendering, it instead relies on a vector-based display. Since the average home television of the era would be completely unable to display such signals, the Vectrex had its screen built in. This got [Arcade Jason] wondering – would it be possible to hook the Vectrex up to a bigger screen?
First, a suitable monitor had to be found. The 19V2000 turned out to be a good candidate – much larger at 19 inches, and found in …read more
For all its simplicity, the arcade classic Asteroids was engaging in the extreme, with the ping of the laser, the rumble of the rocket, the crash of crumbling space rocks, and that crazy warble when the damn flying saucers made an appearance. Atari estimates that the game has earned operators in excess of $500 million since it was released in 1979. That’s two billion quarters, and we’ll guess a fair percentage of those coins came from the pockets of Hackaday’s readers and staff alike.
One iconic part of Asteroids was the vector display. Each item on the field was drawn …read more
Continue reading Light Replaces Electrons for Giant Vector-Graphics Asteroids Game
