OpenSourceGaming
Latest
Students program Human Tetris into 8-bit microcontroller, give away schematics for free (video)
Sure, Project Natal is the hotness and a little bird tells us PlayStation Move is pretty bodacious, but you don't have to buy a fancy game console to sooth your motion-tracking blues. When students at Cornell University wanted to play Human Tetris (and ace a final project to boot), they taught a 20Mhz, 8-bit microcontroller how to follow their moves. Combined with an NTSC camera, the resulting system can display a 39 x 60 pixel space at 24 frames per second, apparently enough to slot your body into some grooves -- and as you'll see in videos after the break, it plays a mean game of Breakout, too. Full codebase and plans to build your own at the source link. Eat your heart out, geeks.
Fuzebox 8-bit DIY game console, strictly for those who'd rather DIY
What do you give the person who has everything this holiday season? How about a game system without any games? Fuzebox is a homebrew, open source 8-bit game console kit based on an ATmega644 8-bit processor, with a whopping 4K RAM and four-channel MIDI sound. The console plays games written in C, accepts two SNES controllers and should come together in an hour and a half or so, as long as you have some skill with a soldering iron. Seventy bucks will get you a bare bones rig, or for an extra thirty you can go all out -- components, enclosures, a controller, necessary cables and one power adapter. If you're one of those people who like to give your kids educational toys that they'll never use, you're welcome. Even if you're not, there is an action packed video (with obligatory breakbeat soundtrack) of the prototype after the break.[Via Make]
Pandora devs announce memory upgrade via confusing brainteaser
We'll be honest with you: we don't read the GP32X board nearly as often as we'd like -- but we did manage to cull from its archive this cold, hard fact: Pandora is now going to ship with 256MB of beautiful, delicious RAM, AND 512MB of flash memory -- that's double what we initially were told to expect, and Craigix confirmed that Ubuntu is now running 20 percent faster with the upgrade. This windfall comes at no additional cost to the patient, patient consumer. Our advice though? Next time there's a seriously righteous spec bump happening, try not to couch it in a riddle. [Thanks, Jared E]
