Links
-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Archives
- January 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- October 2018
- September 2018
- August 2018
- July 2018
- June 2018
- May 2018
- April 2018
- March 2018
- February 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- November 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- August 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
Meta
Category Archives: nintendo hacks
Nintendo 64 Homebrew Via Game Shark
The Nintendo 64 is a classic console now, and much loved, despite losing in commercial stakes to the dominating PlayStation from Sony. It’s one that doesn’t always get as much attention in the homebrew and hacker scene, compared to platforms like the NES and Game Boy. This means the tools required to work with the console aren’t as well-known. However, there’s a remarkably easy way to load homebrew on to the Nintendo 64, if you’ve got the right hardware.
To pull this off, you’ll need a N64 Gameshark, particularly a version higher than 3.0. These included a parallel port and …read more
Posted in game shark, homebrew, n64, nintendo, nintendo 64, nintendo hacks
Leave a comment
New Game, Old Ways: Cramming an NES Game into 40 kB
Why would anyone bother to create new content for a console system that’s staring down its 40th birthday? Perhaps just for the challenge of fitting a game into 40 kilobytes of storage.
That at least seems to be the motivation behind [Morphcat Games] pending release of Micro Mages, a new game for the Nintendo Entertainment System console that takes its inspiration from Super Mario Bros. The interesting bit here is how they managed to stuff so much content into so little space. The video below goes into great detail on that, and it’s a fascinating lesson in optimization. …read more
Posted in 6502, assembly, boss, game, minimization, nes, nintendo, nintendo hacks, optimization, rom, sprite
Leave a comment
Pokemon Cries And How They Work
If you grew up watching the Pokémon TV series, you’d naturally be familiar with the cries of all your favourite Pocket Monsters. Most of the creatures in the anime tend to say their own name, over and over again. Pour one out for the legions of parents who, upon hearing a distant “PIKA PIKA!”, still involuntarily twitch to this day.
However, the games differ heavily in this area. Generation I of Pokémon was released on the Game Boy, which simply didn’t have the sound capabilities to deliver full bitstream audio. Instead, sounds were synthesized for the various Pokémon based on …read more
Posted in nintendo, nintendo hacks, pokemon, reverse engineering
Leave a comment
Use Your Game Boy As A Wireless Controller
Like many retro favourites, the Game Boy is in no way dead — development continues apace through its many fans.But what about the hardware side? This is a particularly interesting one: [Alex] wondered if a Game Boy could be readily used as a wireless controller. Set out to make it happen, the final product is a game cartridge that makes the classic handheld a wireless controller.
It’s achieved quite elegantly, with a custom cartridge used to turn the Game Boy into a controller while requiring no modification to the handheld. The cartridge contains a flash chip to store the ROM, …read more
Nintendo Does Sony, Better Than Sony
Fans of game consoles from the golden era of TV game appliances have been in for a treat over the past couple of years, and a slew of official reboots of the stars of the past have reached the market. These so-called “classic” consoles closely follow the styling of the originals, but under the hood they pack modern hardware running an emulator to play a selection of games from ROM. Since with a bit of hacking they can thus run more than just the supplied emulator, people have managed to use them to emulator completely different consoles. Even then, it’s …read more
Game Boy Camera – Now In Color
The Game Boy Camera is a legendary piece of 90s gaming hardware, despite not being a game at all. It consisted of a low-resolution greyscale camera, fitted to a Game Boy cartridge, that you could use to photograph your friends, vandalise their pictures, then print them out on a thermal printer. It’s hardware that was fun because of its limitations, not despite them. However, [Matt] wondered if there was a way to use early photographic techniques to get color photos.
The technique is simple – get red, green, and blue filters, and take three photos – one using each filter. …read more
Posted in game boy, game boy camera, nintendo, nintendo hacks, photography
Leave a comment
AI Bot Plays Castlevania So You Don’t Have to
We’re not allowed to have TV here in the Hackaday Wonder Bunker, but occasionally we’ll pool together the bandwidth credits they pay us in and gather ’round the old 3.5 inch TFT LCD to watch whatever Netflix assures us is 93% to our liking. That’s how we found out they’ve made a show based on, of all things, one of the Castlevania games for the NES. We wanted to play the game to understand the backstory, but since it hails from the era of gaming where primitive graphics had to be supplemented with soul-crushing difficulty, we didn’t get very …read more
Posted in automated, Castlevania, classic game, classic hacks, emulator, Games, nes, nintendo hacks, sprite
Leave a comment
Editing GameCube Memory With A Raspberry Pi
[James] has been working with GameCubes, emulators, and Animal Crossing for a while now, and while emulators are sufficient, he’d like to play on real hardware. This means he needs to write to a GameCube memory card. While there are a few options to do this, they either require a Wii or hardware that hasn’t been made in a decade. The obvious solution to this problem is to reverse engineer the GameCube memory card to read and write the memory with a Raspberry Pi.
There’s an incredible amount of unofficial documentation for every console, and [James] stumbled upon a GC-Forever …read more
Posted in classic hacks, gamecube, nintendo hacks, python, Raspberry Pi
Leave a comment
GBA on the Big Screen: FPGA Delivers HDMI and Every Feature Imaginable
The concept of creating a gaming portable out of a home console has been around for some time, but it’s hardly seen the other way around. There have been a few devices that dared to straddle the line (i.e., Sega Nomad, Nintendo Switch, etc.), but the two worlds typically remain separate. [Stephen] looked to explore that space by attempting to turn the Game Boy Advance into a “big boy” console. The FPGA-based mod kit he created does just that, and comes complete with controller support and digital video output in 720p over a mini HDMI cable.
The kit itself was …read more
Posted in console, diy handheld, game boy advance, kit, nintendo hacks
Leave a comment
Wheel of Fortune Gets Infinite Puzzles on NES
Wheel of Fortune is a television game show, born in the distant year of 1975. Like many popular television properties of the era, it spawned a series of videogames on various platforms. Like many a hacker, [Chris] had been loading up the retro NES title on his Raspberry Pi when he realized that, due to the limitations of the cartridge format, he was playing the same puzzles over and over again. There was nothing for it, but to load a hex editor and get to work.
[Chris’s] initial investigation involved loading up the ROM in a hex editor and simply …read more