The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for the kitchen, garage and backyard from food to furniture to fun & games for your family.
MAKE Flickr photo pool member abstrakone is restoring an arcade machine using a PC as the brains and adding new hardware to make it work like a regular arcade machine. Follow the photos and how he did it here. For more details and resources on making your own arcade controls, here’s a good resource that MAKE reader Jake sent in. Link.
I think we’ll see something like this for all music players soon- This Widget for Mac OS X grabs the currently playing iTunes song and gives you the lyrics for it. It checks Lyrictracker.com first and if they don’t have the lyrics, iTunesLyrics checks another lyric database. Link.
Here’s a great Phidgets project. We chose to build a ubiquitous version of the 80’s arcade classic “Whack the Mole” since we thought it would be a fun, addictive way of integrating the computer with a really physical game. To make the game a little more sophisticated than the original we made a multiplayer game where one person using a virtual version of our game can connect to the physical game board. Link.
Handy for homebrew GB games- GBAccelerator is our latest and most innovative modification for the Game Boy Advance & GBA SP. GBAccelerator allows you to change the speed of the GBA to one of four speeds including: normal, fast, ultra and slow-motion by simply simultaneously pressing three GBA buttons. GBAccelerator is useful for a number of games and applications. Link.
Good resource- To transfer audio from aging cassette tapes or records, you’ll need some basic audio hardware and recording software. Cassette Deck or Turntable The first thing you’ll need is a cassette deck that can play back your tapes or a turntable for your records. Any tape deck with audio-out jacks should work...Link.
Good resource for getting started in making your own DS games- Tutorial 1: Setting up the development evironment and building an example application that displays text output and reads the touch screen. Tutorial 2: Using the framebuffer mode of the Nintendo DS to draw to the screen. Also explains a bit about the Vertical Blank Interrupt. Tutorial 3: Detecting and acting on key presses. Link.
Handy for all those retro games, over 74,000 in their library- Have you ever rented a game that came with no instructions? Have you ever bought a used game and found out later that the package you received didn’t come with an essential map or answers to copy protection questions required to play the game? Have you ever bought a re-released game and then realized that they only included an Installation Guide, no game instructions at all? Link.
