Building an arcade cabinet seems to be a rite of passage for many hackers and woodworkers. Not that there is anything wrong with that: as this series of posts from [Alessandro] at boxedcnc shows, there is an art to doing it well.

His final build is impressive, with quality buttons, a genuine-looking banner, and even a coin slot so he can charge people to play. His build log covers both the carpentry and electronic aspects of the build, from cutting the panels to his own code for running the coin acceptor that takes your quarter (or, as he is in Italy, Euro coins) and triggers the game to play.

To extract money from his family, he used the Sparkfun COM-1719 coin acceptor, which can be programmed to send different pulses for different coins, connected to an Arduino which is also connected to the joystick and buttons. The Arduino emulates a USB keyboard and is connected to an old PC running MAME with the Attract Mode front end. It’s a quality build, down to the Bubble Bobble banner, and the coin slot means that it might even make some money back eventually.

If you miss the days of playing Pong with old-school dial controllers but would rather not track down a vintage console or arcade cabinet, today's your lucky day. Daniel Perdomo and crew have built a real-world Pong machine that replicates the pioneering game with physical parts. Despite what it looks like, it's not just an Atari-themed air hockey table. Instead of letting physics take over, the machine maps virtual ball and paddle movements to objects. All the eccentricities of Pong gameplay are intact, just in a more tangible (and arguably, far more immersive) form. LEDs track the score, while the controllers are rejiggered hard drives.

If you miss the days of playing Pong with old-school dial controllers but would rather not track down a vintage console or arcade cabinet, today's your lucky day. Daniel Perdomo and crew have built a real-world Pong machine that replicates the pioneering game with physical parts. Despite what it looks like, it's not just an Atari-themed air hockey table. Instead of letting physics take over, the machine maps virtual ball and paddle movements to objects. All the eccentricities of Pong gameplay are intact, just in a more tangible (and arguably, far more immersive) form. LEDs track the score, while the controllers are rejiggered hard drives.

Via: Gizmodo, Popular Mechanics

Source: Daniel Perdomo (YouTube)

If you miss the days of playing Pong with old-school dial controllers but would rather not track down a vintage console or arcade cabinet, today's your lucky day. Daniel Perdomo and crew have built a real-world Pong machine that replicates the pioneering game with physical parts. Despite what it looks like, it's not just an Atari-themed air hockey table. Instead of letting physics take over, the machine maps virtual ball and paddle movements to objects. All the eccentricities of Pong gameplay are intact, just in a more tangible (and arguably, far more immersive) form. LEDs track the score, while the controllers are rejiggered hard drives.

Via: Gizmodo, Popular Mechanics

Source: Daniel Perdomo (YouTube)

Hello, Operator! is the gaming experience that puts you in the role of an 1920's phone operator. The controller is a vintage switchboard.

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The post Play Like a 1920’s Phone Operator with This Switchboard Gaming Interface appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Ian Martin shows off his very impressive homemade Star Wars Dejarik table and runs through its functions and game play.

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The post Project Update: Working Star Wars Dejarik Table Finally Here! appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Escape room games, or mystery rooms, or puzzle rooms, are trending, and many rely on Makers and Maker tech to make them work

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The post Locked In: Behind the Scenes of the Escape Room Craze appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Heidi Røneid with an Arduino Ethernet microprocessor. (Photo: Tore Zakariassen, NRK)

When The Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) planned the television broadcast of the Chess Olympiad 2014 in Tromsø, Norway, they encountered a challenge: how to mix video, graphics and the results of many ongoing chess games simultaneously, requiring 16 cameras for the games going on at the same time?

On their blog you can find a long and nice post about how they found the solution using Arduino Uno, Arduino Ethernet Shield and the library for Arduino to control such Atem switchers written by Kasper Skårhøj:

At first, the idea was to use a computer with a webcam for each of the 16 games, then mix video images, background animation and results in software on each of them.

Afterwards the finished mix of images would be streamed to separate channels in our web player, so that the online audience would be able to choose which game they wanted to follow. This solution would also provide our outside broadcasting van (OB van) with 16 finished video sources composed of video, graphics and results. This would make the complex job of mixing all video signals much easier.

After thorough thinking we came to the conclusion that for our web-audience, it would be better to skip the stream of individual games, and spend our resources on building websites that could present all games in the championship via HTML in real time. This would also give the audience the opportunity to scroll back and forth in the moves and recall all the previous games in the championship. We started working on it immediately, and you can find the result on our website nrk.no/sjakk.

Read the full article on MAKE

Hamburg Maker Meeting 2012, which took place last week and involved about 200 visitors and more than 20 exhibitors, has been a fantastic opportunity to meet and share experience regarding several topics, such as 3D printing, hacking, retro gaming and so on. At the Attraktor Makerspace, several projects have been presented and demonstrated by their inventors, among which we highlight a very nice Arduino-based floppy drive organ that has been employed to play the Tetris game theme.

Moreover, among the others events planned for the meeting, a special sneak-preview session allowed all the interested people to get some insights on the new Arduino Due board, released a couple of days ago.

A video of the event can be found here, while here you may find more pictures.

More information can be found on the homepage of the meeting.

[Via: Hamburg Maker Meeting website]