All things gaming. Consoles, handhelds, Arcade systems and other game related devices and projects.
Minecraft and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are two great tastes, but do they taste great together? One Minecraft player is making an argument for ‘yes’ with a massive project to rebuild the entire map from Nintendo’s modern classic as a playable Minecraft survival map. It’s still in progress, but the results are already impressive.
Designed for emulating a range of arcade and console games — and playing PC games natively — this hefty build impresses.
Pseudonymous maker “PactoTech” has shown off an impressive four-player arcade cabinet build that uses not one but a total of six Arduino boards for handling various features.
Designed for emulating a range of classic arcade and console games, PactoTech’s build Super Smash Bros. Ultimate-themed arcade cabinet features four player control via arcade sticks and illuminated colour-coded buttons, a single trackball, and more traditional gamepad controllers — plus a wireless keyboard and mouse, handily accessible on a storage shelf above the main controls and below the screen.
DMGPlus, another Game Boy replicator. A wondrous labor of love!
Taking a Raspberry Pi and sticking it in the housing of a Game Boy isn’t a new project, though most of these retrofits were undoubtedly more modern than the original handheld console. They usually had more buttons, backlit color TFTs, and ran off modern Li-ion batteries. A project on Spritesmods named the DMGPlus is interested in utilizing the Pi in a stealthier way; instead of using it to update the older console, the DMGPlus is recreating how playing one of the first handheld game consoles used to feel.
3D printing is constantly saving my belongings when something goes wrong. It’s just about the handiest hobby around, and in this video I’ll share a bunch of functional prints, as well as show off some exciting new flexible filaments!
Super Mario Kart went on to become a 16-bit classic and one of the best selling Super Nintendo games of all time. But Super Mario Kart’s origins didn’t even start as a Mario game. From an unsucessful two player F-Zero game to one of Nintendo’s longest running franchises, this is the story of how Nintendo failed into Super Mario Kart.
How does the Atari 2600 display images to the screen with so little memory dedicated to video graphics? It’s all explained right here.
For many of us, the Atari or the NES wasn’t our first gaming console. Instead, it was the Commodore 64, which was marketed as an incredibly affordable home computer, but was also a solid gaming machine. It was very much worthy of a second life as a Game Boy-sized portable, which anyone can now hack together with the right parts and skills.
For around $36, a website called UNI64 will sell you a kit containing custom designed PCBs that, with some technical know-how, can be turned into the Handheld 64: a portable version of the classic ‘80s computer, complete with a tiny QWERTY keyboard so you can even write your own BASIC programs on the go. Just keep in mind that the $36 kit is just the starting point to creating a portable C64.
Driven by a combination of hid_gamepad and hid_keyboard, the switch is designed for use with Microsoft Flight Simulator and Elite Dangerous.
Pseudonymous developer “DarkfullDante” has put together a low-cost switch board for flight simulators, powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico running CircuitPython and housed in an attractive and sturdy case.
Nintendo’s classic Game Boy has long been the darling queen of the handheld scene. However, with many fans modifying their handhelds with power-sucking features like modern backlit LCDs, running on AA batteries can become a frustrating exercise as they rapidly run out. [esotericsean] gets around that by modifying his Game Boys with a USB rechargeable battery setup. (Video, embedded below.)
The hack is a simple one, but the execution is quite tidy. [esotericsean] starts by removing the original DC jack from the Game Boy motherboard, and hogs out the hole in the case to fit a micro USB port. The original battery housing is similarly carved out to suit a 2000 mAh lithium-polymer pouch cell. A single-cell charging board is used to manage the battery, with its original connector removed and replaced with a neater-looking panel mount micro USB port instead. The electronics is then wrapped up in Kapton tape and stuffed inside the shell as everything is put back together.
FacelessTech built this Game Boy cartridge that shows the game title on a small OLED screen.
The original Nintendo Game Boy is now more than 30 years old, but it still has an active community of enthusiasts who make new hardware or modify existing hardware. That includes people who make new game cartridges. To make those, they use “repro” (short for “reproduction”) PCBs that contain re-flashable chips and Game Boy-compatible edge connectors. FacelessTech noticed that those PCBs are quite compact and built a shortened Ghost Cart that is about half the height of a standard cartridge. For his newest project, he used that extra space to add an OLED screen to a Game Boy cartridge.
