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Gaming Archive: Gaming

March 16, 2010

How-To: SNES Super Gameboy line out audio

Instructables user Kyle Robinson writes:

The Super gameboy (SGB for short) is Gameboy cartridge player for the Nintendo Entertainment system. Chipmusicians who use LSDJ or Nanoloop can use the SBG to compose on a large screen. Wether its at home with friends, or in a studio environment, the SBG can be a great tool for gameboy composing and today we are going to make it even better.

Check out his how-to for adding an audio line out to the SNES Super Gameboy.

March 12, 2010

How-To: Toddler's Guitar Hero controller

What do you do when your toddler's having trouble reaching the buttons on the guitar for Beatles Rock Band? Why, modify it and make an Instructable, that's what!

Toddler's Guitar Hero controller

March 10, 2010

Play rock paper scissors by yourself with this handy glove

Enjoy playing rock, paper, scissors, but having trouble finding worthy opponents to play it with? Need to improve your game for that upcoming world tournament? Well, then, you will certainly appreciate Steve Hoefer's rock paper scissors playing glove. Thanks to the built-in accelerometer and bend sensors, all you have to do to play is play the game, and the computer will tell you what it's move was, and keep track of who won. It's a funny project, and it includes some cool features, such as using edge-lit plastic for the display. Well done!

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March 4, 2010

Computer gaming rig from aluminum pipe

Don Sturrok made this loungy, immerse computer gaming rig out of an Ikea chair, aluminum pipe, and Kee Klamp and Kee Lite fittings from Simplified Building Concepts.

Computer Gaming Chair Becomes Reality

Playing pinball with your mind

To demonstrate the capabilities of the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface, researchers from the project recently hooked their EEG up to a pinball machine, allowing a lucky test subject to play the game using only their mind. [via gizmodo]

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February 24, 2010

Read an RPG Book in Public Week

Read an RPG Book in Public Week is an event that happens three times a year, during the weeks surrounding March 4th, July 27th, and October 1st (starting on the Sunday on or before, and ending on the Saturday on or after). During these weeks, roleplaying enthusiasts are encouraged to take their favorite RPG rulebooks out with them and read them in public -- on the bus, in the coffee shop, at lunch, at the park, or anywhere (as long as it isn't disruptive to work, school, church, or any other functions).

The point is to make the roleplaying hobby more visible, to get it "out of the basement" and into public areas where more people can see it. This will make others more aware of the hobby - some may ask you what your book is about, giving you the opportunity to explain the hobby to them. A few of those may be interested enough to try it themselves. Former gamers may see what you're reading and think about the great times they used to have with roleplaying, and possibly even try it again.

[via Boing Boing]

February 20, 2010

Writers reminisce about Dungeons & Dragons

From Boing Boing:

Matt sez, "With that rocks-for-brains reporter in Boston trying to link campus shooter Amy Bishop's crimes to Dungeons & Dragons, I thought I'd take an opportunity to look at the good D&D has done for several writers I know. This is that article. By the way, I've been a D&D player for almost thirty years now, and have been a happier, more productive person for it."

And Cory adds:

I haven't played since my early 20s (late teens?) but D&D was an enormously positive influence on my life and imagination.

And I would add: Me too! D&D helped me as a writer, storyteller, project organizer, and was also one of my entrees into making. When I started with D&D, my friends and I were too poor for miniatures, so we made our own from clay, and our dungeons and scenery were constructed out of paper, cardboard, and foam. I got my first Dremel tool to help me make gaming components. And it was my first heavy, multi-application use for my first computers (writing scenarios, player handouts, drawing maps, keeping character databases, and hanging out on D&D BBSes).

Not to mention, as someone who has dyslexia, it helped me with my number/math skills and in seeing the utility of applying math to something that was hugely fun and creative.

Writers reminisce about Dungeons & Dragons

Scratch Board guitar

Wandering through the MAKE Flickr pool the other day, I saw what appeared to be custom-made game controlling guitars. Taking a closer look, I saw that they were actually using Scratch Sensor Board controllers. The Scratch Board is a neat device with four inputs for custom built sensors. On the board itself are a potentiometer, light sensor, sound sensor and a push button. Your program can look for user generated input on each of these, which can change your program or game based on the sensor input.

Chris, whose photostream the picture was in told me a bit about the project:

February 12, 2010

SurfaceScapes 2.0 demo

Wolfgang Baur, former editor of the immortal D&D magazine DRAGON and current publisher of a new, independent D&D magazine Kobold Quarterly had a chance to play around with the second edition of MS Surface-based SurfaceScapes D&D game. There are a lot of cool developments, like being able to load your character sheet onto a smartphone and have it continually updated as you take wounds. Here are Wolfgang's impressions:

Movement and line of sight work great. In fact, a clever DM can distract the players, then move an orc from one patch of cover to another, where he again becomes invisible -- right until the moment a PC gets line of sight on it.
It's still a demo. They've got a TON of work to do to integrate more powers, but the newest build for PAX East covers up to 5th level PCs, plus area attacks. Lots of basics still aren't implemented, like say a charge or anything outside the 1st PHB half-Heroic tier.
The sound effects. Subtle, but powerful. Each attack comes with a sound. Dropping a dragon figure on the surface generates a roar and cloud of smoke. I could get used to this. What does a beholder sound like, I wonder?
The Infinite Map. Being able to scroll the map under the figures is nice; it makes the table infinitely large. Not news for Fantasy Grounds players, but obviously useful. When the map scrolls, colored lines connect your figures to their new positions to make them easy to shift.
Figures and Screens Together. The combination of real and virtual PCs and NPCs worked much better than I expected. There's been some hard work done on the interface design which takes me to .....
At Your Fingertips. Overall, the interface is intuitive and easy to learn. You can pull up your PC's powers on the table. Frankly there's no reason this couldn't be integrated with the DDI if that's the direction the team wanted to go.
4E-Only. I asked about Pathfinder or generic game support. It ain't happening; this is specifically meant to handle 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. A generic system would probably be less valuable to gamers than one that handles specific rules.

See Wolfgang's post for a lot more details of his experience.

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.

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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!

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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]