Make: Online: Gaming Archives

Gaming Archive: Gaming

February 5, 2010

Star Trek Next Generation Pinball Modifications - Trouble with Tribbles

Jeri's Star Trek Next Generation Pinball Modifications - Trouble with Tribbles. Nice!

Modifications to a Williams Star Trek Next Generation pinball. Added lasers to the cannons, custom-etched flipper bats and added animatronic tribble for replays.

The end of the video has some great tribble action.

January 29, 2010

Retro Thing's hackable USB joystick

Touchscreen and computer vision interfaces are slowly starting to replace the traditional game controllers in next generation systems. Today's Wiimote will be tomorrow's joystick. Speaking of joysticks, the guys over at Retro Thing are producing some pretty cool classic Atari-style joysticks using clear plastic and a USB interface. Besides being an awesome retro game controller, the USB controller board is fully hackable and comes with labeled solder points to connect up to 8 additional control~~ler~~s (buttons, switches). Perfect for a homebrew MAME cabinet or tabletop build.

More:

January 26, 2010

Propeller-powered Arcade Machine

MAKE subscriber Jeff writes in to share his latest project, a Propeller powered Arcade Machine. Rather than building a PC-powered MAME cabinet, he decided to base his around a Propeller microcontroller. While it is kind of funny to put such a tiny device in a large cabinet, writing some fun games for the system should be a fun challenge. Good luck getting it working!

More:

In the Maker Shed:

Propeller Proto Board USB

Our Price: $39.99

The Propeller Proto Board USB has all the features of the Propeller Proto Board and includes the USB programming interface on the board for those projects which need the USB interface in the application.

January 24, 2010

Sudoku puzzle solver using awk

Solving Sudoku with awk

awk is a fun and powerful language available in the command-line of Linux, Mac OS X, and even Windows (with a little help from Cygwin). In fact, our own Dale Dougherty co-authored one of the classic books on awk (and sed, another great Unix power tool) back in 1990 (the second edition was released in 1997), sed & awk.

At The Geek Stuff, Bill Duncan has posted a fun awk program that can solve Sudoku puzzles:

The application I chose to use as an example is "yet another sudoku puzzle solver". I must confess at the outset that I have never sat down to solve one of these puzzles myself, but sketched this out over a few days while commuting on a train and watching other people work on them. It was far more fun I think than actually doing any of the puzzles..

[...]

This program uses a very simple depth-first recursive backtracking algorithm with up-front and ongoing elimination of invalid entries. Awk may not have the expressive power for representing complex data that perl or other languages have, but with care, many moderate sized problems and data sets can be used. This algorithm may not be the best one around, but it is certainly fast enough for most problems and is easy to implement.

When you strip out blank lines and comments it's only 67 lines! Keeping in the awk spirit, that would be:

awk '!/^[ \t]*#/ && !/^$/' solve.awk | wc -l

Yet Another Sudoku Puzzle Solver Using AWK

If you need to generate some puzzles to throw at it, try this Sudoku Generator written in Python.

January 20, 2010

Power Wheels car modded into wireless warthog

Tim modified some kid-sized jeeps with laser tag weaponry + game controllers to create a live action game in the spirit of Halo's warthog vehicles. In the above interview he explains the sizable list of gear used to make it all happen. I'm guessing a simpler take on the idea could be built using RC vehicles with infrared sensors and emitters. A full rundown of the build can be found over at Microsoft's Coding4Fun blog.

January 11, 2010

Wii Wand of Power watchdog circuit

Have you ever been in a situation where you needed to get up to go do something, but didn't want to leave a game for fear your system would go to sleep while you were away and you couldn't use a software hack to nudge the system? Maker Todd Harrison had a similar issue and decided to build a device that closes a circuit every 25 seconds inside a Wiimote shaped candy tin.

It's just a simple timing circuit made of discreet elements that engages a reed relay ever 25 sec. This relay in turn closes a circuit in my keyboard for the left arrow key. Being this external circuit is self powered I can simply turn it on when I want a game or application to think I'm at my computer when I'm not. I know there are software hacks that can do this and I did try a lot of them but this particular on line game I play had a way to block such software hacks. I had to go old school, which is not hard for an old guy, and do it with hardware.

January 6, 2010

Tabletop non-virtual Pong

The DIY mavens at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories made this tabletop playable Pong game and very thoroughly documented the build and functionality.

What is PONG supposed to represent?

Our answer to this question is a game somewhere between pinball and ping pong: Two players each have a single knob that controls the position of a paddle along a short track. Using the paddles, they bounce the ball back and forth and try not to miss the ball, lest the other player score a point. The paddle surfaces are curved, so that the ball reflects in different directions depending on the position of impact. The paddles are powered, so that the ball keeps a fairly constant velocity between the two sides, and the speed gradually increases as the game is played. The playfield is level and has a dotted line down the middle, and the scores are displayed on either side of that line. There are top and bottom walls of the playfield that the ball can bounce off of. Sounds possible, right? So we built it.

Printable chess set

This fun chess set ostensibly can be printed by a 3D printer, though there seem to be a lot of overhangs to me. Nevertheless it's a fun idea. Basically, creator laird designed each piece to display what moves it can make in order to "make Chess approachable for kids."

The king has the tallest 'body' and has its name printed in large type to indicate its importance. The circle represents the king's ability to move one space in any direction.

The queen is about as tall as the king, with the 'head' indicating that the Queen can move any distance in the eight directions.

The knight is shorter, with cubes arranged around a central diamond indicating the eight squares that the knight can jump to. The arrangement of the cubes on the top and the back, and the angle of the supporting head, are intended to evoke a horse's head.

The bishop and rook are the same height, with 'heads' indicating their ability to move any distance in either the diagonals or horizontal and vertical.

Finally the pawns are the shortest. The 'head' indicates the ability to move forward one square, or capture diagonally. I couldn't think of a way to indicate moving forward two spaces, or capturing en-passent.

The 3Ds are available for download on Thingiverse.

January 5, 2010

Tony Dowler's microdungeons

Twitter user orkboi, also known as Tony Dowler, has created some humorous mini D&D dungeons for his new website microdungeons.com, where he plans to publish three a week in 2010. My favorite is the bird-shaped dungeon in the style of cartoonist Ape Lad's Twitter avatars.

December 30, 2009

Use your N900 as a PS3 controller

Using BlueMaemo, the Bluetooth multi-tool for Maemo, you can turn your Nokia N900 into a PS3 controller. Install the latest alpha via the application manager with extras-devel enabled. The above video is in Italian. [via Maemo Central]

December 17, 2009

Pong prom combines slow dancing, pong

Looking for something fun to do with that special gamer in your life? Well, you might want to try Ed Keeble's Pong Prom, which combines the formerly disparate activities of slow dancing and pong. LED displays embedded on the front of each garment show your partner's side of the pong game, and you play by swinging them around. Instructions aren't provided yet, however a how-to is promised soon. [via technabob]

WebGL Draft Specification Published

Rich 3D graphics in standard web content without a plugin just got one step closer to reality. The Khronos Group recently announced the availability of the first WebGL specification draft.

WebGL is largely based on OpenGL ES 2.0. It makes the OpenGL APIs available through JavaScript, allowing Web developers to draw 3D graphics inside of the HTML5 Canvas element. The goal is to bring all of the power of OpenGL directly to the browser by exposing the low-level graphics APIs. In theory, the flexibility of this approach will make it significantly more useful than previous 3D Web technologies like VRML which confined developers to a handful of predefined abstractions.

WebGL draft published, Khronos seeks community involvement [via precentral]

December 9, 2009

Downloadable papercraft Elder Thing

British video game artist Wayne Peters has a downloadable fold up pattern (PDF) for his 28mm paper model of one of Lovecraft's master baddies from At the Mountains of Madness. [via Propnomicon]

December 3, 2009

Wii remote for MAME on iPhone

Mobile gaming mastermind ZodTTD has updated his mame4iPhone app to use BTStack, allowing the use of a Wii remote as a controller. I could see using this with the iPhone app video out hack as a low-cost casual gaming console. It would be pretty cool to go from playing a mobile game directly to playing the same game on a large screen with a controller. It's no Xbox, but give it a few years.

November 29, 2009

Inside the Halo armor with Vrogy

Over the past few years, I have been fascinated by this Halo armor project by Michael aka Vrogy. The piece that first caught my eye was his M6G pistol made of foam. He's been posting to the MAKE Flickr pool for quite a while, allowing us to see what he's up to as the projects evolve. Recently, we've had an email exchange where he has shared some of the process and techniques that he is employing on this masterful personal project. He has also been posting updates for the work on his blog.

There are a few others who have been down this road, though most people in the hobby tend to take the easy way out, either with low-detail suits and props which are quick to build, or recasting statues to build armor. A few have gone all the way to full suits, but mostly by hand-sculpting everything - which probably works out to the same amount of hours.

Check it out after the break for details on his software and prototyping techniques.

November 24, 2009

DIY capacitive pressure sensor tile

I am a sucker for a good SketchUp exploded view (although I think the screws shown in this one just have to be wrong). This plan comes from the usbddr project. From the readme file:

usbddr is firmware for the Atmel ATMega8 which implements a usb controller ("dance pad") for games such as stepmania. In contrast to other homebrew dance pads, it uses capacitive sensing, eliminating mechanical wear and allowing adjustable sensitivity.

There's some good discussion of the project over at Hack a Day,

November 22, 2009

Stained glass d20s

From Flickr user Bloodthirsty Vegetarians, who also produce an eponymous podcast. [via Neatorama]

November 20, 2009

DIY accelerometer controlled USB gamepad

Check out this homebrew accelerometer controlled USB gamepad using a PIC18F2550 from Starlino. You'll find code and schematics on their site.

The code for the firmware was written in PicBasic Pro and it implements a HID USB device with 2 axes and 4 buttons (only 2 buttons connected in the prototype). The device is detected by Windows XP/Vista as a standard USB gamepad and can be used with many games and applications.
I am using a 2 Axes Buffered ±2g Accelerometer from DIMENSION ENGINEERING, it has a built in voltage regulator that allows powering the accelerometer directly from the USB bus (5V)

November 18, 2009

"Father of video games" documentary

Motherboard has this wonderful look inside the world (and workshop) of Ralph Baer, creator of Pong, Simon, and other electronic/video game classics.

Ralph Baer and His All-Purpose Boxes

Banned Xboxs flood online marketplaces

Xbox360
Banned Xboxs flood online marketplaces via BBG.

Hundreds of Xboxs have appeared on online marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist in the wake of the mass Xbox live bans. Over the past week Microsoft has banned nearly one million users from the online gaming service after finding that they had modified their consoles to play pirated games. Since the ban is connected to the console rather than a gamer's online account, many modified Xboxs have appeared online being sold by banned users. eBay has issued a warning to users on its website to be wary of buying consoles in the wake of Microsoft's move. In a post on the website's guide section, it said: 'If you are looking to buy an Xbox 360 on eBay in the near future, ask the seller if it has been banned from Xbox Live and be sure to pay by PayPal in case they lie. If you do get a banned console, start a PayPal claim.'
Microsoft has said that all bans are permanent to the console and no affected units will be permitted back onto Xbox Live on any account.

You can get a banned console for $40 now. I know that a lot of Microsoft folks read MAKE so please Microsoft folks, figure out something else besides permanently crippling millions of devices. Sure they can be used to play offline, but I doubt the owners will keep them, so it's one stop to trashville. They'll end up in a landfill, at least offer a way to re-active them or something, anything.