Even before 3D graphics and advanced shaders became common in the gaming world, there were concerns that virtual violence looked too realistic. Fighting games in the 1990s were routinely toned-down by having gratuitous displays of blood removed, which was often seen as disappointing by dedicated fans. [Raphaël Boichot] has been working to right this wrong in one obscure case, by rectifying the lack of blood in Sengoku 2.

Sengoku 2 was a title released in 1993 for the Neo Geo AES/MVS and the Neo Geo CD. It hit the market with relatively tame graphics that didn’t reflect the realistic amount of blood that should be released when an enemy was chopped in half with a sword. Noting that there was no simple DIP switch configuration or bit to flip to enable a more adult version of the game, [Raphaël] decided to create a custom blood hack the hard way. What ensued was a heavy-duty reverse engineering effort, swapping out palettes, and carefully editing tilesets in order to turn the censored graphics into something more lurid. A lot of artistic decisions had to be made to manipulate things just so in order to create a pleasing effect that didn’t mess up other aspects of the graphics at the same time.

If you’re a big Sengoku 2 fan, or you just want to learn more about reverse engineering and hacking on an obscure platform, dive into the project and enjoy the learnings. Otherwise, dive into the entirely different sorts of blood-related hacks we’ve featured over the years.

Running DOOM on weird obscure hardware is a fun hacker pastime that’s been around for a long time now. It’s always enjoyable to see someone port it to an egg timer, or a hat, or whatever else. But what about running the iconic shooter on a CPU of your very own? [Armaan] and [Liam] have done just that.

The CPU in question was designed at the logic gate level, deployed on to an FPGA, and hooked up with the necessary peripherals to run as a going concern. Early testing of the CPU involved running straightforward code to generate Mandelbrot sets and to play a simple game of Pong. But [Armaan] and [Liam] had bigger goals: to port the game that everybody ports to everything. Doing that took some work.

To get DOOM running, the CPU had to get faster, and it needed many tweaks to how memory was handled. There was also work to be done to create a keyboard interface, an HDMI video output, and a hardware timer. From there, the game itself had to then be ported to the custom CPU’s architecture. Eventually, the duo had the game running… at a glacial 0.7 FPS. A success, but not the magical end result that was desired. A bump to clock speed and further optimizations and compiler tweaks eventually got the game up to an impressive 15-20 FPS. The goal for future work is to push it to an entirely-playable figure of 30 FPS or better.

It’s worth checking out the (apparently unembeddable) videos on Instagram to see the CPU in action. We’ve also featured plenty of fun DOOM ports before, too. If you’re brewing up custom CPUs or DOOM ports of your own, keep them coming to the tipsline. The latter in particular is often a wonderful milk run for the writer that happens across it. Happy hacking out there!

Game companies might not like physical media much anymore, but gamers sure do. There’s nothing like pawing over your collection to find what to play, and inserting a cartridge with a satisfying click before sitting down to an old-school game like — wait, Cyberpunk 2077? Yeah, that wasn’t released on cartridge, but that didn’t stop [Jibril-sama] over on Reddit. The cartridges are 3D printed — stls on makeworld only, as of this writing — and contain old 2.5″ SSDs that [Jabril] was able to pick up in bulk.

Inside the base unit is a simple USB3-SATA adapter that hooks to [Jabril]’s gaming PC. There are two versions of the base unit: a simple vertical unit, and a horizontal one with some springs to give a satisfying grip.

On each disk is a launch script that is vetted by a program on the PC that autolaunches only the cartridges you’ve told it to trust, which is a level of security we can appreciate. [Jabril-sama] has kindly made that available under the MIT license on GitHub.

We don’t know how much life is left in these cheap drives, but they should last a while if the only write is the odd save file. Hopefully [Jabril-sama] is cycling through his games fairly often, as SSDs are only non-volatile storage if your time horizon is short enough.

Thanks to [iliis] for the tip! Remember, if you use our tips line to share what you find, you’re not doomscrolling, you’re doing a public service.

Back when Google ran a functional search engine, there used to be all kinds of quirky, fun antics hidden in their products. From Easter eggs in certain search results, to a flight simulator hidden in Google Maps, to funny, engaging April Fools jokes, it was a lighter, less corporate time. Now, though, to recreate any of that early Google magic, we have to do it on our own, and [Paul] has come up with an arcade cabinet for the classic Google Chrome dinosaur game that does just that.

Although the Dinosaur Game is still available in modern versions of Google Chrome, it lends itself almost perfectly to an arcade cabinet. Built from 18 mm plywood, the cabinet is standard DIY arcade fare with a built-in shelf to house the electronics and a 4:3 flatscreen monitor for a display. The Raspberry Pi 3B is also just enough to run the game, but the software running on it is unique. The Pi runs an operating system called FullPageOS, which automatically loads a modified version of the Dino jumper in full-screen mode. It’s been changed to look more like an arcade game than a browser Easter egg, with features like a leaderboard and an automatic-play screensaver mode, and the build is rounded out by a cactus-shaped scratching post to accompany the cabinet.

As for gameplay, we couldn’t ask for a simpler user interface. A single button is all that’s needed for this game, and it’s surprisingly engaging. It is a bit large for a single-button game, even with its reduced-width cabinet, so if you’re looking for something smaller, you could always base it on a tabletop arcade system instead.

One of the major strengths of the BASIC programming languages has always been their no-fuss setup and rich set of commands for operations that would take considerably more work in a bare-bones language like C. MoonBASIC continues this legacy with a BASIC variant optimized for both 2D and 3D game development.

Included in the package are Raylib, Box2D, and Jolt, whose functionality is exposed via over 4,200 commands in their respective namespaces. You can also download a whole IDE package based around VS Code, use it on the command line, or add it to an existing VS Code installation.

A quick glance at the ‘getting started‘ guide gives a pretty good idea of what to expect of MoonBASIC, including a range of custom language additions and support for PBR materials, dynamic lighting, and other modern game engine features.

Whether writing a game in BASIC was on your bingo card for this year or not, it might be worth taking a look to see whether it’s your jam. After all, if BASIC was good enough for both AI and game development in the 1980s, surely it can be used for complex games in 2026.

Sometimes you see a project and immediately, before going into the details, your mind throws up the old refrain: “coulda used a 555” — well, [Hulk] actually agrees when it comes to his ESP32-based, 3D printed roulette wheel. The first version did use a 555, but then feature creep kicked in and the final project ended up with an ESP32 instead. We’ve all been there.

The roulette wheel circuit is retained from the 555 version, with the ESP32 providing clock pulses instead of the venerable oscillator chip — it uses a pair of decade counters to create the chase effect of the LED around the wheel. With a handsome printed enclosure, [Hulk] could have stopped there, but then he’d have to keep track of scoring and the like manually like some kind of dark age peasant. It’s the 21st century, we have computers to to that for us!

Now, even though the ESP32 is still driving the LED chase via the decade counters, it can keep track of where the “ball” of light lands, and reports that via WiFi or serial. While it would have been an option to run the whole game on the ESP32. [Hulk] just has those values put into an SQL database on a server, which also runs the game front-end via PHP. The resulting web page lets two players make their bets and track their wins and losses over time. You can see that in action in the video embedded below.

Overkill? Sure, but we suspect [Hulk] already had the equipment and experience to make this the fastest way to get a playable game. There are easy ways to serve web content from an ESP32, but the easiest tool to use is always the one in your back pocket, right?

Modern video games are nothing short of amazing. My son and I were playing through the one of the latest Zeldas, which involve a mix of combat and puzzle-solving that’s pretty much the hallmark of the franchise. But the most recent open-world Zelda is simply massive. Made by around 1,000 people at a development expense of $150,000,000, it takes probably 60-80 hours to play through if you’re not rushing, and more if you’re taking it easy. It has layers of game mechanics, and worlds in the sky, on land, and underground. It’s big in every way.

Contrast the games of my youth, which were a lot smaller. Written by a pair of people or maybe a handful, with playtimes in the single-digit hours, and of course fitting in the limited computing resources of the time. But the low-stakes nature of the early phases of the industry meant that software developers could take risks, and many of the games were consequently kinda idiosyncratic in this more innocent time.

I think there’s something to be said for small games. They don’t require a lifestyle commitment just to get through. They can still be fun, without taking all of your time. And honestly, when you’re done with a game quickly, you have more time for other stuff. Granted, some of this spirit lives on in the small indie games of today, but even so, game developers have the big studios’ products in the backs of their minds when they are working on their smaller oeuvres.

We were talking about preserving old games for posterity around Hackaday and on the podcast, and our conversations reminded me of a couple of educational games that, despite their rudimentary graphics, are still pretty good today. Both were electronics related, and both are still playable today thanks to efforts on emulation and software preservation. To get a feel for the 1980’s, give Rocky’s Boots a try. (I like the TRS-80 Color Computer version the best, but that may just be nostalgia.) Most of you grownups out there will get through it in an hour or so.

And if you want a challenge, try Rocky’s harder sequel: Robot Odyssey. If you already have a background in digital circuits, you’ll find it doable. Younger me hit a wall about two-thirds of the way through.

Both of these games stick with me because they taught me something, but also because they were simply quirky in a way that a game can only be when it’s written by a small team of folks who are just having fun programming it. If you pitched “a puzzle game about a raccoon who builds logic circuits to activate robot boots”, the boardroom would look at you like you’re out of your mind. But it’s just exactly the quirkiness and individuality of some of these early games that I cherish the most.

If you find yourself knee-deep in an endless modern game, take a side-quest off into a more naive time, and you’ll appreciate why people are putting efforts into archiving them.

With Nintendo’s 3DS experiencing a bit of a renaissance lately, prices for functioning systems have shot through the roof. Getting a busted one with a broken screen is a lot cheaper, but then you run into the eye-watering price difference between a replacement top screen for the regular version and the larger XL variant. The latter costs about the same as a whole new used 3DS, while the former goes for peanuts. Here the solution is obvious, with [Skawo] demonstrating how they hacked the cheaper, smaller top screen into a New 3DS XL.

The price difference on AliExpress as shown in the video is on the order of $120, with the smaller screen going for less than $10. Since they both use the same connector pin-out and display technology, you can plug either display into the New 3DS XL mainboard.

Where you’ll run into issues, other than the replacement display being obviously not XL, is the physically shorter flat flex cable for the controls that forces the display to be installed in an offset manner. You need jailbroken firmware like Luma3DS here to adjust for the screen offset. Filling in the missing screen real-estate is the other issue you have to patch over somehow, which was done here in barbaric fashion with some cardboard.

Beyond that it does work, and as a fix to at least get a broken New 3DS XL back into the game it’s worth considering. Do note that there’s a difference between regular 3DS and New 3DS (second generation) screens with neither being compatible, so be careful before you try such a fix.

Perhaps the most ridiculous statement that anyone can make is that a computer system with clearly enough processing power ‘cannot run DOOM‘. This is why we accept the premise that a PDP-11 cannot run this game, but something on the order of a Neo Geo gaming console with its 68000 processor and for the time impressive GPU definitely ought to be able to.

The stated problem here is a lack of RAM for a framebuffer, with the CPU only having 64 kB to play with. This limitation now has seen two different approaches to try and circumvent it, as covered by [Modern Vintage Gamer].

The first project here is Doom64kB, which as the name suggests tries to somehow work with this system RAM limitation. It uses the Doom8088 port for the original IBM PC and similar Intel 8088-based systems. This had to massively reduce the feature list, including the lack of texture mapping for floors and ceiling, no saving or loading, and no music.

The other project is DoomGeo, which doesn’t try to bend the Neo Geo hardware to its will, but accepts the Neo Geo way of doing things: involving sprite strips, pre-baked graphics, fix-layer UI, and a minimum of runtime data. This of course drastically changes how the Doom game engine normally works, with its framebuffer-based rendering.

From this we can thus conclude that it’s not so much the processing power that limits where DOOM can run, but more of how framebuffer-friendly the system architecture is, yet with some ingenuity and a complete rewrite of the game engine even that is no major obstacle.

(Top image: Neo Geo AES console. Credit: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia)

Valve recently released a new version of the Steam Controller, which features a wired USB puck that serves both as charger and dedicated, low-latency wireless receiver. The downside is they aren’t currently available for purchase separately, but that’s not a worry because you can now make your own thanks to [safijari]’s OpenPuck project.

OpenPuck uses the highly affordable Pro Micro NRF52840 board, programmed to emulate the wireless receiver portion of the puck, meaning one can pair their Steam Controller to it just like they would with the factory puck. A major part of the project was naturally documenting the wireless protocol, but there’s also an array of extra features offered by OpenPuck.

Hitting button combos lets one conveniently emulate Xbox, Nintendo Switch, or Sony PlayStation controllers. Meaning OpenPuck can for example be plugged into a Nintendo Switch and it will see OpenPuck as an official wired controller, complete with motion sensor and haptic feedback.

Why is it necessary for this emulation to be done from OpenPuck? Because while the Steam Controller has tight integration with Steam Input — a sort of highly useful translation layer for controller inputs — that integration also means the controller’s best features only work while Steam is running. OpenPuck’s ability to emulate other console controllers makes it flexible in a way the factory puck isn’t, and a user can make the most of a single controller this way.

It’s worth noting that while the real puck has the ability to charge the controller (whether or not the user makes it walk itself), the OpenPuck doesn’t have this ability. Does that mean one must still use the factory puck for charging? Not at all, as the Steam Controller charges just fine over a USB-C connection.

There’s a short video below that demonstrates the flashing and setup, so check it out if you think it might be useful to you.

Thanks for the tip, [Jaki]!

Targeted towards refined female gamers unlike the savagery of the mainstream game consoles of the era, 1995’s Casio Loopy was a bit of an oddity of a game console. Despite being standard enough in its design and backed by the might of Casio, it saw only one year of active software development and hardware manufacturing ceased by the end of 1998. With only eleven titles released for the system, with none of them being Doom, this obviously terribly upset [Throaty Mumbo], who set out to right this egregious wrong.

For the two dozen people or so who have one of these systems, you can experience the fruits of his labor yourself via the GitHub repository and something like the FloopyDrive cartridge.. Despite the quite capable Hitachi SH-1 16 MHz CPU and 1 MB of RAM, the main limitation is probably the original 2 MB of ROM space that does not leave a lot of space for DOOM WADs, even after doubling it on the FloopyDrive. Correspondingly you only get a handful of levels out of it.

Overall game performance isn’t too bad, though in the port’s current unoptimized state the resolution is fairly low. That said, even the console’s built-in printer is supported and demonstrated in the video, which is a pretty nice touch. It’s not like Sega or Nintendo consoles allowed you to screenshot those glorious headshots.

As unique the Nintendo Wii U Gamepad may appear to be, at its core it’s pretty much just a tablet with game controls stuck on it. Now that the communication between the Wii U and the Gamepad have been fully reverse-engineered and poured into easy to use software, this opens the possibility of using other tablets with suitable controls on them for Wii U Gamepad purposes, like the Windows-capable Samsung tablet that [Bringus Studios] decided to experiment on.

Originally designed to run Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, the Samsung Q1 series of ultra-mobile PCs (UMPC) was first released in 2007, featuring a 900 MHz Celeron M CPU. Amusingly [Bingus] mixes up mAh and mWh when comparing battery capacities, as the Li-ion battery pack for this UMPC is an 11.1V one, whereas a smartphone battery is 3.7V nominal.

To turn this UMPC into a Wii U Gamepad, first 32-bit Debian 12 is installed along with the Vanilla Wii U Gamepad project. The main challenge then is to find a Wi-Fi adapter that works for this purpose, as the connection uses a slightly non-standard handshake. Naturally the TP-Link USB WiFi adapter that [Bingus] used changed from its previous and better supported Mediatek chipset to a Realtek one with typical poor Linux support, requiring manual driver compiling.

After more troubleshooting, it’s unfortunately found that the 900 MHz Celeron M in this UMPC just isn’t up to the task, with the decoding of the compressed HDMI stream correspondingly pegging the CPU at 100% with all the frame dropping. It’s likely that this is due to a lack of h.264 hardware decoding support, as this would push this burden onto the CPU. The system uses the Intel 915GMS chipset with the GMA 900 iGPU, which appears to just provide hardware acceleration for MPEG 2.

As far as things go that you are likely to find during a relaxing walk in the forest, Nintendo 64 game cartridges probably do not rank high on that list. Yet this is what happened to a friend of [BlueBox Tinkers] a few years back, leaving him dying to see whether the cartridge would still work, as well as what game it is since its labels got obliterated courtesy of its time spent enjoying the outdoors. Fortunately he recently got a chance to see whether he could revive this cartridge.

The insides look pretty much like what you’d expect after presumably months or years of exposure, with the metal shield severely corroded. The PCB does however look pretty decent still, with obvious signs of corrosion on the front-side vias, and a pretty gross-looking back side.

Unfortunately it wasn’t confirmed whether this friend tried to stick this old cartridge into an N64 console, but [BlueBox Tinkers] wasn’t going to take any such chances. First up was an inspection and deep cleaning of the PCB, showing that it had escaped real damage, with the shield having taken the brunt of the corrosion. Cleaning up the shield and the insides of the plastic shell is by far the hardest part, with the pitted metal and rust stuck on the plastic. For a full restoration you’d probably want to for a reproduction shell and shield here.

Ultimately the game turned out to still work, with the mystery game sadly fairly predictable, but with someone’s old save files still intact. Somehow it seems that what Nintendo did to make N64 cartridges dust- and child-resistant also makes it survive in the woods, so if you find one during a forest walk, it’s totally worth it to adopt it and take it home.

Valve has always designed hacker-friendly hardware, and in that spirit, [NaKyle Wright] released Inkterface, a design for an E-ink faceplate to fit the recently released Steam Machine. As far as projects go, this one is meticulously documented, so give it a peek.

The system uses a selection of components that include a 5.83″ E-ink panel and driver board, a small lithium-polymer battery, and an ESP32-based controller board. [NaKyle] used a Feather V2 and display from Adafruit, so you might be in for some GPIO changes if you go with a different board.  A cleverly-designed 3D printed frame and bezel hold everything just so, creating a snug assembly with minimal wiring hassles.

The faceplate is wireless and self-contained, attaching with the help of four magnets. On the software side, the host machine communicates over Bluetooth, and a service takes care of pushing updates. An app for configuring and talking to the display will be available on Steam eventually, but in the meantime one can install that part manually.

[NaKyle]’s bill of materials calls for specific components, but the underlying design is very modular. Should one wish to make hardware or component changes, alterations to the 3D printed parts might be needed as well. Fortunately, [NaKyle] includes the .step files alongside the .stl models. We love to see that, because it makes tweaking or customizing so much more accessible. A homebrewed version of this E-ink panel might be just the thing to complement a homebrewed Steam machine.

Be sure to also check out the repository of Steam hardware, which contains drawings and 3D models of the Steam Deck and Steam Controller, useful for designing holders or custom brackets or whatever else one may need.

At one point in time web rings were one of the best ways to find content on the World Wide Web — involving not just a directory of participating sites, but also each site linking to each other in a ring-like fashion. With search results these days becoming increasingly less useful, having such a focused resource sounds better and better, with the Warp Point directory and web ring now doing just that for video game websites. Topics range from reviews to retro gaming and game development, so there’s probably something for everyone here.

For the reasoning behind this effort take a look at this article by [Wes Fenlon] and [Matt Sayer]. The inspiration was part nostalgia and part longing for the return of a simple system that Just Works without algorithms, advertising, ‘AI’ and corporate overlords involved at any point in time. Everything is just focused on helping you find the content and community you were looking for as quickly as possible, though spending a few hours just clicking through the ring is also perfectly fine.

Everyone is free to submit their own awesome site to Warp Point, after which it’ll be manually reviewed. Even if not strictly curated, it would seem to be a refreshing return to a more simpler time, using an approach that should still hold up just as well as it did in 1999.

Although the big commercial web directories like those on Yahoo! quickly became unwieldy and unusable, there’s a lot to be said for having these small, focused web directories and rings to regain that sense of community and humanity that’s become so scarce on the WWW in 2026.

After the Nintendo 3DS saw various Nintendo 64-era titles like Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask ported to it, there was a lot of speculation that the GameCube/Wii title of Twilight Princess might soon make its way to this handheld gaming system too. Unfortunately no official release happened, but with the recently decompiled source code of the game in hand, [Tobi] set out to see whether such a port was realistic.

Compared to the somewhat scruffy Nintendo DS and DSi handhelds, the 3DS hardware is decidedly more beefy, both in the processor department as well as in terms of RAM with 128 MB of FCRAM (Fast Cycle DRAM). This puts it within batting distance of the game’s original two consoles.

In the video the current status of the porting effort is demonstrated, with the game actually running surprisingly well despite the early state of the porting project. Even with the rather impressive graphical glitches and overall instability that one would expect at this early stage, the game is essentially already playable.

As noted by [Tobi], the next steps will involve fixing these bugs and above all actually optimizing the so far quick-and-sloppy port. Along with the possibility of actually having Twilight Princess rendered in 3D, this is a rather exciting development that demonstrates that an official version of the game for the 3DS would have been easily possible.

This is one of those projects that was both inspired and made possible by the absolute embarrassment of dev boards available to the modern hacker. In this case, the dev board was the M5Stack PaperS3, which as the name implies combines an ESP32-S3 with an e-ink panel. [Wenting Zhang] picked one up and was immediately inspired to try and make an e-ink Game Boy.

The M5Stack PaperS3 made this project possible by exposing the display with row/column control — parallel, some would call it, as opposed to the usual serial interface of SPI. That allowed [Wenting] to work some of the same e-ink magic he perfected on his Modos monitors to allow partial refresh at up to 60 Hz. That the ESP32-S3 is capable of emulating a Game Boy while driving the screen should surprise no one, since it can emulate an MSX while outputting VGA or even Windows 95 on a 386. In this case, he’s basing the actual Game Boy emulation on Crank Boy.

Of course the e-ink screen on the M5Stack is far larger and has a much higher resolution than what the Game Boy shipped with, which lets him implement touch controls and scale the image up 3X so he can fake a couple of shades of grayscale while actually outputting black and white. Even better, if he was actually playing this thing on the regular, once the high-refresh portion of the screen starts to wear out, he can flip the orientation and keep gaming on the virtually-unrefreshed control portion of the screen — doubling the lifetime of the system, something many of you raised as a concern when we last looked at a his e-ink monitor project.

The only real shortcoming of this hack is the sound. With one-bit beeps coming out of the M5Stack buzzer, it’s got nothing on Nintendo’s hardware. Of course, that’s partially down to using the hardware as-is. With the addition of an I2S sound chip like the one used in the MOD player project we featured recently, you’d just need to squeeze out enough processor cycles to make this sound as good as it looks.

Sony has just announced on their PlayStation blog that they will stop the production of game discs starting January 2028. This effectively means a shift away from physical media to one that fully relies on downloading content from the PlayStation online store.

Although not technically confirmed, this announcement would strongly indicate that the PlayStation 6 will do away with its optical drive altogether as previously speculated. Of course, physical media has long since been on the ropes, particularly when it comes to gaming. Valve’s recently released Steam Machine doesn’t feature an optical drive, and for that matter, neither does the average gaming PC these days. But it’s still disappointing to see in many ways.

Although digital downloads have their advantages, a major problem here is that due to Digital Rights Management (DRM) you only ever get a license to lease a game. This means losing the ability to lend or borrow a game, and will likely mark the end of second hand sales. With narrow exceptions such as Good Old Games (GoG) and its DRM-free installers that you can e.g. burn onto a CD or copy to a USB drive as a static instance of the software, this shift by Sony effectively ends game ownership for PlayStation owners.