Bringing Old Arcade Machines Into the Internet Age 95
An anonymous reader writes "To celebrate the opening of their hackerspace, Sprite_tm of SpritesMods hacked an old 1943 arcade machine to record its high scores, as well as post them on Twitter, via a newly added TCP/IP stack. The bus-tapping module he added to the machine lets him read the full contents of the Z80 logic board's memory, allowing him to store high scores for posterity as well as add an Ethernet interface. The device should work on any Z80-based machine, which makes it easy to add these same capabilities to any old arcade cabinet."
Please (Score:5, Interesting)
Post more stories like this. This is what I read slashdot for.
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/agree
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Stuff like this only matters for geeks and nerds.
If there was only a site that had the slogan "News for nerds stuff that matters." That would cover things like interesting hacks and new improvements to technology, and also showing ways to reuse old technology in new ways.
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I've got no problems with seeing ads. I do have a problem with executing ads, and that's why I use NoScript.
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Aren't you, you know, already DOING something while on the toilet? Or do you just like the feeling of numbness you get after sitting on it for awhile?
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If you have subscription, you'll see the upcoming story about how the classic Apple (TM) game Marathon was legally modded using an Apple (TM) iMac so it can run on an Apple (TM) iPhone (TM) (R) (C) 4G, with patented Apple (TM) (R) (C) (CCCP) technologies that let it run the game multiplayer at near broadband speeds - the Apple (TM) way.
Please... Please... Please! (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to agree with this. Back in the day this was the kind of thing that I came to /. for along with pointing out the cool techy news from the edge of the mainstream. But now all I am left with are the same stories that broke on CNN earlier in the day. It is CNN for goodness sake. They shouldn't be scooping a specialty news site on their own topic.
Anyway screw news as it is going to be bad anyway and the summary will be wrong and just go with cool stuff. Dude Hacked his toaster to talk with the coffe
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^
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What he said
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I made the same assumption when I first read the summary.
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In the summary's defense, "1943" is italicized.
I agree with the first post (for once): This kind of article is what brought me to Slashdot.
Re:Evidence of time travel? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's weird is that the Z-80 was first released in 1976 which actually puts it closer to 1943 (33 years) than to the present (35 years).
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1943 [arcade-museum.com]
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I also know who Steve Wozniak is, why he is more important that Steve Jobs and I can do binary-octal-decimal-hexdecimal conversion in my head.
My lawn, everyone get off it.
heh (Score:2)
my 8 year old can count to 1023 on his fingers SO FAST it ain't funny
he also loves 260
00100000100
er uh-- 132 (Score:2)
(I knew that didn't sound right)
0010000100
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I didn't realize negative numbers were involved in counting...
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neat, he's got 11 fingers?
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Well, dogs flew spaceships. Whatever preceded the CIA obviously had access to alien technology, so when they came here from Orion on Z-80 powered ships, well, we naturally embedded these in videogames to find gifted teenagers to pilot our planetary defense fighters.
And that's where Howard Stark came from. All clear now? Good. Enjoy the rest of the movie.
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MAME (Score:2)
You can't even do this in MAME anymore. They dropped high score support because it was an ugly hack. This is still an ugly hack, but still a lot cooler than doing it in software.
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This is still an ugly hack, but still a lot cooler than doing it in software.
What they did wasn't a hack, it was an elegant way to utlize the exisiting bus based infrastructure. Plug in the new bus master and read your data off without changing the game. Plus the technique is probably adaptable to any number of games from the same era.
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Re:1943 wouldn't that be pinball? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure that they mean this game:
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6769 [arcade-museum.com]
The Pinballs games with 1943 in the title were Victorious 1943 and World Series 1943 and I don't think either would be referred to as simply 1943.
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Yes it was. The way the story was written it looked like it was an arcade game from 1943. That said I actually never remember that game, and I am over 20 but I never spent much time in the arcade.
WMS ones had a dial up modem in a pinball testing (Score:1)
WMS ones had a dial up modem in a pinball game for testing / reporting it uploaded to a hidden ftp directory.
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No new scores since 2010. Sucks to see cool projects like that slowly die.
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yea its a game made by capcom
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Sigh, 1943 is the name of an arcade game from the late 80s. 1943: The Battle of Midway [wikipedia.org] compared to most of the stuff on this site, it's not really that obscure.
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See how "1943" is in italics?
English has rules, you know. Titles get italics.
From a five-digit ID, at that. Maybe it's just been too long since fourth grade for you.
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See how "1943" is in italics?
English has rules, you know. Titles get italics.
From a five-digit ID, at that. Maybe it's just been too long since fourth grade for you.
I thought it was a young whipper-snapper using the more modern rule of "italics means emphasis" as in 1943 is really F-ing old if you were born post 2000. Now you kids get off my lawn....
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I thought the Z80 was reverse engineered from the Roswell crash?!?
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You came here in that thing? You're braver than I thought!
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Maybe 1943 is a brand name?
Or maybe it's the name of the game. "1943" was quite a popular game long before you were born, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and video games were played in strange darkened rooms called "Arcades".
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Maybe 1943 is a brand name?
Or maybe it's the name of the game. "1943" was quite a popular game long before you were born, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and video games were played in strange darkened rooms called "Arcades".
LOL I expect that stuff I did in the 80s such as computers would be considered "old" now, but I expected Old Arcade Machines as in "Bringing Old Arcade Machines Into the Internet Age" to mean something like an ancient (to me) electromechanical pinball machine. Other than being in somewhat higher res and having somewhat better sound, most modern arcade games have not changed much since the 80s, so I didn't think of them as meeting the "old" criteria.
Your nerd card (Score:1)
You will turn it in now.
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Seriously, you click through and actually post a comment on an article about arcade games but "1943" doesn't instantly define a game for you in the same way as "pac-man" and "space invaders" and "steet fighter" do?
I must be getting old. Excuse me while I shoo some kids off the lawn.
Remote? (Score:2)
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It would actually be pretty easy - there are regular commercial pinball machines which use a simply button with an automatically pulled spring to launch the ball.
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You could do that, but there'd be too much latency for really good players. Flipper buttons are digital but modern games (anything newer than 'Funhouse') scan them every 2ms and react. You can flip them 'lightly' as a result. Also remember that the flipper itself takes a small but non-zero amount of time to rise and fall and that matters (eg. when flipper-passing the ball).
One of my first jobs on pinball was writing life-testing code for a test fixture. Springs and solenoids last for a really long time. I'm
AKA "1943: The Battle of Midway" (Score:3)
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Midway? So wouldn't that make it a pinball machine?
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Nope, they mean Midway as in Midway Island. In which you fly your P-38 (a plane that actually never operated from carriers and didn't participate in the Battle of Midway) off a carrier to sink the Japanese air and naval forces single-handed. Of course, the Battle of Midway actually took place in June of 194*2*... Still, a really great arcade game. I own several ports of it for various home consoles. It was originally released in Japan by Capcom, and was very popular there too. Rather odd considering t
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Just so long as they don't make a bally landing...
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1943 was probably my favorite NES game. I wasted many an hour and shirked many a homework assignment for that game. But even in elementary school I could pick out the glaring historical inaccuracies. Still a fantastic game, better than 1942. I saw some copies of 1944 floating around, but never got a chance to load em up.
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Of course, the Battle of Midway actually took place in June of 194*2*... .
from memory "1943" was the 2 Player sequel to the successful "1942" which kind of explains the change in year for the Battle of Midway
I would look it up, but I will leave that for someone who cares about this more than me.
For those of you not in the know of 1943... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.arcade-gameover.com/1943.asp [arcade-gameover.com]
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6769 [arcade-museum.com]
And the obligitory wikilink...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943:_The_Battle_of_Midway [wikipedia.org]
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The rare story that beats its own headline (Score:2)
Then I saw it was 1943. That game devoured so many of my quarters back in the 80s
Open source Operating System for Pinball tables (Score:2)
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How is this different from PinMAME and Viusal Pinball?
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Thank you for the explaination. :)
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I don't know what in the hell you guys are doing and I lost my coding skills years ago, but that, my friend, is a bookmark I'll be following for as long as you guys work on it. Thanks.
Sweet!!! (Score:3)
The bus-tapping module he added to the machine lets him read the full contents of the Z80 logic board's memory, allowing him to store high scores for posterity as well as add an Ethernet interface. The device should work on any Z80-based machine...
You mean I can get my old Sinclair ZX81 (which used a Z80 logic board, IIRC) on-line?!?! Sweet!
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That was my immediate thought. It's a lot faster to save off programs using that than reading them out into a cassette player!
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You mean like a ZX81 webserver, perhaps?
Oh, look. There's one! [endoftheinternet.org]
(Warning: The aforelinked page is allegedly actually hosted on a ZX81, which allegedly can grok HTTP all by itself. It will probably halt and catch fire soon.)
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You can certainly get a Sinclair Spectrum online (but not with this board), with the Spectranet, which is an ethernet board designed for it. You'll even be able to buy a Spectranet soon.
The Spectranet provides the Speccy with a BSD-like socket library, and a host of ROM-based modules (it has 128K of NOR flash that gets mapped into the lower 16K), such as filesystem modules, modules that snapshot memory over the network etc. (as well as the more mundane stuff like the DHCP client).
A couple of quick demos:
Str
Well done (Score:1)
True story: We used to have an old PC dedicated to the game "PC-man" in our student house. It too lacked a high score mechanism. Even if it had had one, it wouldn't have served a 20-person student house very well. I hacked the existing game to include a hi-score list which listed each player exactly once. To set a new high score, you needed to at least break your own personal record. This was *the same* student house Sprite lived in a few years later. I don't know if Jeroen got inspired by that old PC-man h
Re:Well done (Score:4, Interesting)
Sixpack for the win :) Nope, I didn't see the pacman machine, though I have heard about it. When I obtained an Atari from somewhere, I was inspired by the story and put it in the hallway with a copy of Xenon 2 permanently plugged in. Good times were had, until the machine broke. A bit later we got a PC next to the living room TV to watch all the creative-commons-licensed movies shared around the campus on (*cough*) and we played Puzzle Bobble completely to death. So yeah, the game , if anything, was an inspiration for more gaming :)
The PC connected to the TV still runs a menu on top of X that's written by me. I also automated the beer-list to a LCD+touchscreen thing, and while it's made out of bad soldering joints and gaffer tape, somehow that contraption still manages to survive.
What about online multiplayer? (Score:2)
I wished legal Kaillera [kaillera.com] would update again so I can game online with these old 1980/80s arcade games. There is a new one, but very new [blogspot.com] and has support to multiple platforms (Linux too!).
I just want someone to emulate them on the web (Score:2)
Sure, I have mame, but I'd love it if there were a website that had all these great games up for playing as flash/whatever.
Oh where did they go? (Score:2)
I so miss those arcade machines. Seems the only place they really still have a life is in Japan (go fig).
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I so miss those arcade machines. Seems the only place they really still have a life is in Japan (go fig).
They went into peoples' basements. I have 28 of them in mine, all coin-ops from 1980 to 1986 primarily. Awesome hobby.