Super Monkey Kong crams 14k of Jumpman excellence onto Meggy Jr RGB

Like we said at the outset, the incredibly inventive and fun handheld hardware of Meggy JR RGB is only as good as the games that hackers can manage to squeeze onto it. Well, we'd say the hackers have won. Steven Read has built a fully-functional Donkey Kong clone called Super Monkey Kong that plays out on that delicious 8 x 8 grid of RGB LEDs. It took him roughly 3,000 lines of code to do it, which compresses down to 14k, the max allowable by the AVR microcontroller in use. Check out the video at the read link to see it for yourself.

[Via Oh Gizmo!]

[yincrash Posted Apr 21st 2009 9:38AM]

the best part is to defeat monkey kong, you have to punch him in the junk.

[superhobo Posted Apr 21st 2009 9:38AM]

Quite awesome.

[ijyt Posted Apr 21st 2009 9:38AM]

I still say this thing is worthless.

[ccmpbll Posted Apr 21st 2009 9:40AM]

yeah, how can you even play that?

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 21st 2009 11:00AM]

I remember having a Coleco football game where the display was a grid of narrow, rectangular red LEDs. Not a fat rectangle, but the type of LEDs used for number displays. It was about 8 LEDs high by 10 wide. Even more basic than this concept, there was no way of discerning which dot was your player and which was the computer's defensive line except from the starting position, and the fact that your dot responded to your keypad input.

It was playable, and actually quite fun in its primitive way. Then my sister smashed it. :(

[hemmy Posted Apr 21st 2009 3:12PM]

@george

I had that Coleco football game too, it was fun indeed! (Your sister is a demon).

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 21st 2009 9:42AM]

Party like it's 1959!

[edzy Posted Apr 21st 2009 9:54AM]

Gaming with Lite-Brite.

[GirTheRobot Posted Apr 21st 2009 10:03AM]

Gameplay is more important than Graphics any day of the week. That being said, this kind of takes it to the extreme... it's a neat retro style toy, but really... what's the point?

[Dee Posted Apr 21st 2009 11:05AM]

WOW! Awesome work, even though it's primitive it's still challenging to play...wouldn't waste my money on getting the device though, better things to spend my money on.

[Ninbrendo Posted Apr 21st 2009 11:09AM]

Reminds me "Bank Shot", a handheld electronic pool game from 1980:

http://www.handheldmuseum.com/ParkerBros/BankShot.htm

I think I still have mine boxed up somewhere...

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 21st 2009 2:50PM]

I wonder if he can make this in high def... like use 10x10 leds instead..

[Chefgon Posted Apr 21st 2009 7:21PM]

This is ridiculously cool. This is a far more complete and playable game than I ever expected to see on this thing. Now I kind of want to buy one and try my hand at writing a 64 pixel game.

[DeAthWaGer Posted May 3rd 2009 2:03AM]

The point is it's a basic learning tool with real results, and it feels really cool to hold something you programmed, in the palms of your hands, on a portable system that you HAND BUILT YOURSELF.

Also, the 16k limitation (32k with expansion) is very important to young programmers who tend to build very inefficient code.
Howard Scott Warshaw had very limited space making his slew of Atari 2600 games, with very mixed results (well, 5 weeks to make ET wasn't nice for one guy to do by himself).

Back in my day, we had to program games/apps in Q-basic in intro to programming. If someone had a laptop, it was really cool to have a "to go" version of your program sitting in your lap.

If I were a video game design teacher (which they teach right down the road from me), I'd find a way to get the whole class one of these each. Maybe even offer a contest with prizes. That'd get 'em motivated.