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Retro Homebrew & Console News is a site that has the latest Retro Homebrew News, DCEmu Hosted Coder Releases, Interviews, History and Tutorials, Part of the
DCEmu Homebrew & Gaming Network.
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May 5th, 2012, 00:41 Posted By: wraggster
If you're in the market for some weekend reading, we've got quite the issue of our weekly tablet mag in the hopper. James Trew takes a look back at 40 years of cultural impact at the hands of Atari in this installment's feature. It doesn't matter to Darren Murph that Apple isn't making an iPad / MacBook Air hybrid, he still wants one and he tells why. Keeping with the gaming theme, Ludwig Kietzmann asks ifTrials Evolution is the perfect game in this week's Reaction Time. The hands-on section pays a visit toBlackBerry World while spending some time with Spotify's iPad app and Microsoft's new SkyDrive software offerings. On the reviews side of things, we put the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, Acer Iconia Tab A510 and a duo of throwback mirrorless cameras through the wringer. Speaking of e-readers,Switched On offers some thoughts on the matter and IRL lets you in on three more of our go-to gadgets. If that's not enough, Stat shows how Android slates are feeling the Kindle Fire's heat, The Next Web'sMartin Bryant has a go at the Q&A and Box Brown has the Last Word on a hero's required pixel density. Ready to feed that retro gaming appetite? Visit your link of choice below to grab a copy of the weekly to get started.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/04/d...ears-of-atari/
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May 2nd, 2012, 01:29 Posted By: wraggster
It seems [Charles Moyes] and [Mengxiang Jiang] won’t suffer from the sore wrists and thumbs from an Atari controller any longer. They built a version of Pong played by concentrating and relaxing while wearing an EEG headset.
Right now, there’s only enough hardware for one player; when the player operating the red paddle concentrates the paddle moves up – relax, it goes down.
The hardware portion of the build is fairly tricky business. [Chuck] and [Mengxiang] built a circuit to amplify the tiny voltages between their ears into something a microcontroller can read. The circuit is loosely based on this Arduino EEG build, but highly refined as the elegance of an ATMega644 requires.
The EEG amplifier has a cutoff of under 50 Hz, perfect for reading the Alpha waves correlated with concentration. The oscillations from the skull-cap are sent through the ATMega to MATLAB where after a pass through an FFT the brain waves are converted to mouse scroll wheel output.
There’s a demo video available where you can see spectators screaming at the poor test subject telling him to relax and concentrate on command. You can check that out after the break.
http://hackaday.com/2012/05/01/playi...ith-your-mind/
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April 30th, 2012, 01:25 Posted By: wraggster
This week saw the 30th anniversary of the launch of Sir Clive Sinclair's legendary ZX Spectrum - the more powerful, full-colour follow-up to the seminal ZX80 and ZX81 - and a genuine gaming phenomenon.While the Spectrum's place in gaming history is indisputable, it was not the only computer launched in 1982 that offered a generational leap in power over its predecessor; later that year, the brilliant Commodore 64 arrived to replace the lacklustre VIC-20. Coming in at over twice the price of the 48K Spectrum, the C64 wasn't cheap, but it was packed with custom hardware clearly aimed at offering arcade-style gameplay to the home computer audience. While the Spectrum dominated sales in the early 80s, the C64 began to catch up and thus the scene was set for the first great platform conflict: the basis for thousands of classroom arguments and countless playground brawls.So with the benefit of hindsight, which was actually better - the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64? On the face of it, from a technical perspective there's no real contest here. While the Spectrum enjoyed a resolution advantage, the C64's VIC-II graphics chip offered hardware scrolling and sprites that weren't available on the Spectrum, while the impressive three-channel SID chip annihilated the efforts of the poor single-channel speaker embedded in the Sinclair machine - and it was the C64 that helped define the chip-tune musical genre that is still going strong today. In short, one machine was designed primarily with home computing and programming in mind, while the other had advanced custom hardware dedicated entirely to smoother, richer graphics and vibrant sound."Commodore spent a huge part of their efforts developing the audio and video chips. Why else would you put them in there if it weren't to make games?" says ex-ZZAP! 64 reviewer, erstwhile C64 games dev and current studio head of Ruffian Games, Gary Liddon."The VIC-II chip seems to be built off of concepts that were already fairly common in arcade machines; mainly sprites and smooth scrollable screens made from character sets. Contemporary arcade titles like Scramble already had similar capabilities."Jason Page, the ex-C64 coder and musician for developer Graftgold, now heading up Sony Europe's audio R&D department, concurs with Liddon's assessment."I'd think that if the C64 was aimed at education and learning to program, then it certainly got it wrong - C64 BASIC was essentially a load of POKEs. I'd say that there was certainly an 'entertainment' element in the C64 design. If Commodore expected it to be used for games, I guess that's likely," says Page.Looking at the two major HD consoles of today, just imagine the cheaper Xbox 360 launching without any kind of graphics hardware at all, while the PS3 retained its Cell/RSX CPU/GPU combo. The technical curiosities and tweaks in visual effects work that tend to separate cross-platform games of our era would expand into an enormous gulf of difference if the same game had to run on one system with no graphics hardware support at all. To a certain extent, that's how it was back in the day on the Spectrum and Commodore 64.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...s-commodore-64
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April 30th, 2012, 00:15 Posted By: wraggster
[Kyle] and an a few of his classmates are wrapping up a microcontroller interfacing class at Purdue and thought it best to send in the . It’s a version of Super Smash Bros. made by just bitbanging pins on a microcontroller.
The hardware for the project is based around a Freescale 9S12c32, an updated version of the 30-year-old M68HC11 microcontroller. For the controls, the guys used a Playstation 2 joystick and buttons housed in an Altoids box, and the actual console is made out of strips of wood stapled together to look like a crate from Super Smash Bros.
There are nine playable characters: Pikachu, Captain Falcon, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Mario, Luigi, Link, Kirby, and Fox. Despite these characters being only four pixels high, the game looks extremely playable (at least when two players don’t choose the same character). After the break is the video demo of Super Smash Bros: Bitbang edition, along with a gallery of pics showing the console and gameplay. All the code is up on GitHub for your perusal.
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/29/bitba...er-smash-bros/
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April 30th, 2012, 00:13 Posted By: wraggster
Halo may have made its way to the Atari 2600, but wouldn't porting a retro game to this '70s-era console be more appropriate? MAKE Magazine has the skinny on former Atari dev Scott Williamson's port of the Cinematronics shooter Star Castle. Though Atari execs decided the title was too complicated to bring over in the '80s, Williamson took it upon himself to make that transition possible. The result of some serious coding is 8K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM's worth of good ol' space war. But he didn't stop there -- he redesigned the cartridge with a transparent casing and LEDs that flash during gameplay. Click through to the source link for the full step-by-step.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/27/s...le-atari-2600/
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April 29th, 2012, 23:55 Posted By: wraggster
Product delays that push back release dates a full year are never good. What's worse? When that product finally does launch and even someone inside the company votes against it. That's exactly what's going down with the CT510 GameBox, the Eedoo Kinect competitor for the Chinese market. Though it's gone through a fair share of reincarnations before arriving at its current config (it was formerly known as theeBox), the final package has a dual-core CPU, a minimum of 250GB in HDD storage and a 3D GPU, and comes pre-installed with eight games and ten apps. All told, it will cost a cool 3,799 yuan ($600) when it ships on April 29th -- some very ambitious pricing, considering that the imported Xbox with Kinect (the console isn't officially available in China) already sells for about $459 in China, according to M.I.C. Gadget. A director from the Lenovo-backed company seems to agree: in a Sina Weibo poll asking users whether they'd buy the product (pictured after the break), he selected the answer, "No way! Price-to-performance ratio too low." Though to be fair, the gentleman later clarified that it was an honest mistake, and that his company is targeting the high-end family users instead of the core gamers. Well, we shall let the sales figures do the talking.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/28/l...onsole-launch/
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April 28th, 2012, 23:00 Posted By: wraggster
Retro emulation-based handheld GameGadget has had its RRP slashed from £99.99 to £59.99.
Makers Blaze say the move is due to “phenomenal demand and support”. Furthermore, the company has said it will refund all current owners £40 to make up for the price drop.
“Demand and support for GameGadget has been phenomenal taking us completely by surprise,” GameGadget creator Jason Cooper stated. “It has enabled us to secure significant cost savings on future production, well ahead of schedule.
“As we are serious about GameGadget becoming a “must have” gadget, that everyone can afford, we are therefore passing on our cost savings immediately.
“From day one we said we would be honest with our customers. We shall be refunding all customers the equivalent value of today’s price drop. They and future customers can now be confident that GameGagdet has reached its optimum price, in record time. There will be no further price reductions.”
Since launch the device has been beset by problems, including a software issue that prevented it functioning correctly out of the box.
Some owners have also been angered that, for the time being at least, only 30 titles are available for the machine, all of which are Mega Drive titles priced at £4.99 a piece.
Blaze is marketing the download service as “the gaming equivalent of iTunes”.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/blaze...-owners/095178
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April 27th, 2012, 01:07 Posted By: wraggster
No, it’s not just another MAME cabinet build. [Le Chuck] over on the arcadecontrols.com forum built a fully functioning 1/6 scale replica of the classic 1983 Atari arcade game Star Wars.
The hardware is a CAANOO Linux-based portable media player running an emulation of the classing 1983 Star Wars video game. When [Le Chuck] turns his cabinet on, MAME4All boots up and goes directly into the game.
Because there are no 1/6 scale arcade parts, [Le Chuck] needed to fabricate most of his build from scratch. The case is basswood, along with the very-accurate light up coin slot doors. The joystick for the game was a bit tricky; the Star Wars game used an X Z joystick modeled after the yoke in the cockpit of an X-wing. To build this joysitck, [Le Chuck] took apart a few pots and crafted the joystick out of thin sheet metal. The controls operate exactly like the original, only in 1/6 scale.
After the break you can see the video of this incredible build in action.
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/26/micro...a-work-of-art/
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April 25th, 2012, 02:30 Posted By: wraggster
Bummed that you won't be making it out to E3 this year? Well, at least you'll be able to console yourself with your very own tiny iPad arcade. According to Ion, the iCade Core, the latest in the company's line of nostalgia-inducing Bluetooth tablet controllers, will be shipping to UK customers in mid-June for ￡49.99 ($81) a pop. The iCade Mobile will be hitting right around the same time for the same price. Now you'll finally be able to experience Pac-Man the way it was meant to played: on a tablet attached to an oversized joystick.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/24/i...r-you-in-june/
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April 24th, 2012, 23:50 Posted By: wraggster
[Daniel] wrote in to tell us about his PIP-Boy 2000 prototype. While most PIP-Boy remakes we’ve seen tend to be focusing more on the aesthetic side, like a prop, [Daniel] is attempting to make a functional one. He has included a GPS sensor, RFID reader, and radiation detector in his build but did choose to stick with the familiar PIP-Boy visual theme in the menus. He has a very long way to go if he wants it to do everything the PIP-Boy from Fallout did, but his list of semi-functional features is growing steadily.
Currently there are the basic functions of:
- automapping and waypoint navigation
- external PC interface
- inventory status and item recognition (using RFID)
- player experience (adds experience as you go to new locations)
- ambient radiation
- screensaver
Let us know when you get that sucker to stop time [Daniel]
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/24/pip-b...ion-over-form/
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April 23rd, 2012, 19:51 Posted By: wraggster
[Joe] sent us an email to show off his latest build. Tank Wars is the beginning of a video game/robot hybrid. You control the tank via an iPad, telling it where to go and how to fire. You have real life targets, in this case another robot. When you hit your target, the interface is updated with game stats. Currently, this is only a step past being a wifi controlled robot. [Joe] is working on making the game part of it a little more interactive.
The tank and the target are both run by Arduinos with RN-XV WiFly modules. The tank has obstacle avoidance both forward and backward, which, from the video, seems like it might make navigating a bit challenging at times. The iPad interface is just a web page, so it could really be used on any device. This is pretty cool, we can’t wait to see how he proceeds from here.
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/23/tank-...-physical-bot/
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April 23rd, 2012, 19:46 Posted By: wraggster
Today marks the 30th anniversary since the invention of Clive Sinclair’s seminal home computer, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
To honour the device and its impact on the development of home computing, the device has been honoured with a Google doodle depicting George and the Dragon (as it’s also St. George’s Day) in 8-bit graphics.
Predated by the ZX80 and ZX81, the ZX Spectrum was the third device to have been made by Sinclair, but it was the first to be aimed at the home market. On release, it was available in two models, the 16KB which cost £125 and the 48KB which cost £175 and was marketed against the BBC Micro.
Since then, the device has achieved cult status with over 23,000 software titles released for the platform (including 90 made in 2010) and earned its creator Clive Sinclair a knighthood for ‘services to computing’.
http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...versary/028239
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April 20th, 2012, 23:48 Posted By: wraggster
If you’ve been trying to think of stuff you can do with the DCPU-16 this may inspire you to write a clone of a classic game.
This version of Pac-Man was written using a sprite system with a 16 color pallette. It runs in an HTML-based emulator, so you can even monkey around with the assembly code to help you figure out how it works. But if you’re not into writing code that is this machine-close, you can just click the ‘run’ button and use your keyboard arrows to play through a level or two. You’ll notice there’s only one game board available so far and some things are still missing like that familiar waka-waka as he gobbles up the dots. Let us know if you mange to extend the features of this version.
In case you missed it, this emulator is running the DCPU-16 spec from Notch’s new game, 0x10c (. We have no idea how that’s going to shape up, but getting in on the game early will pay off it turns out to be as popular as Minecraft.
http://hackaday.com/2012/04/20/dcpu-16-running-pac-man/
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April 19th, 2012, 01:09 Posted By: wraggster
35 years ago this week, at San Francisco's first West Coast Computer Faire, a tiny startup named Apple demonstrated its new personal computer, the Apple II. It was the company's first blockbuster product — the most important PC of its time, and, just maybe, the most important PC ever released, period."
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/0...turns-35-today
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April 18th, 2012, 23:54 Posted By: wraggster
The game that launched a multi-billion dollar franchise is now laid bare for your hacking pleasure. [Jordan Mechner] just posted the once-lost source code for Prince of Persia. This game was ground-breaking for its use of rotoscoping to mimic the movements of an actor (in this case it was his younger brother). Oh, and it’s a ton of fun to play.This comes at an appropriate time since yesterday was the the 35th anniversary of the Apple II release. PoP was written for that platform but should be easy to get running on an emulator if you’re just interested in cloning the repository so that you can play it through once again. Interestingly enough, the source code went missing for many years. [Jordan's] been looking for the original source code for a decade. Turns out his Dad came across a cardboard box with some original copies of the game in it and shipped it off for [Jordan] to take care of. Inside was a set of 3.5″ disks that are pure retro gold.So here’s your chance to inject yourself into the game. The question is, will you be the Prince or will you be Jaffar?http://hackaday.com/2012/04/17/origi...code-released/
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