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Modder turns candy canisters into gaming console, retro Pong paddles (video)
This is the second time this week we've covered a modder getting an old-school game to run with the help of some unexpected hardware. And arguably, it's the simpler of the two tales. A fellow named John Graham-Cumming fashioned a game console out of little more than a pair of metal canisters, an Arduino Pro board, and a potentiometer -- all so he could play Pong on his TV. The rig (cutely dubbed the Cansole) actually consists of two controllers, with the secondary one housing just a potentiometer. The first has one, too, but also houses the Arduino Pro, along with a battery, A/V controls, and a button for selecting and firing in the game. Et voilà! 1970s arcade-style tennis for two. For a 90-second nostalgia break, head on past the break to see these vintage-looking paddles in action.
Telecommunications device for the deaf gets hitched to a rotary phone, hacked to run Zork
In today's episode of "But will it run Zork?" a chap named Ulysses got the vintage game to run on a TDD (telecommunications device for the deaf) -- a project he built to show off at the Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend. In a move we truly respect, he hunted down a rotary phone lifted straight out of the era when Zork was conceived (that would be the late '70s / early '80s). Then, he modified a modem so that the acoustically coupled TDD could be interfaced -- transmitting at a slow 45.5 baud to make it easy for even ponderous readers to keep up, one line at a time on the TDD's narrow display. Once this was sorted, things weren't exactly smooth sailing when Ulysses started fitting the compressed Zork story file into the system. At first, he tried using an Arduino Pro and an Arduino Mega, but found that neither had enough memory to accommodate the compressed Zork story file. Ultimately, he took a different tack and settled on an embeddable FitPC. We'd love nothing more than to see this thing in action, but in lieu of a video we highly suggest carving out a few minutes and perusing Ulysses' photo blog at the source link.
