Recently researchers finished mapping the central nervous system (CNS) connectome of not just the female Drosophila melanogaster (i.e. fruit fly) brain, but also that of the male D. melanogaster for a comparative analysis. Here the sexually dimorphic changes turned out to induce specific mating behavior that ensures that there will only be smooching between genetically fit D. melanogaster males and females, while the rest of the connectome remained effectively the same.
Of course, with this connectome in hand it led some people to ask themselves what else one can do with this connectome graph of about 160,000 neurons other than make a fruit fly into a fruit fly. So far we have seen [Nftechie] turn this connectome into a crypto stock trader with the Stonkfly project that uses the connectome’s reward circuits to potentially make profitable trades, though [Nftechie] says that they haven’t verified yet how good a fruit fly is at trading stocks, only that it does said stonks.
Over at [PC Gamer] they summarized a number of things that people have also done, including trying to make the connectome control a game of DOOM and Beat Saber. Each game frame stimulates sensory neurons, with the generated outputs then mapped to game controls, with dopamine-producing reward circuits wired in for reinforcement learning.
Although the D. melanogaster brain is only the merest fraction of the size of the human brain, it does provide us with a glimpse of what actual artificial intelligence research may lead to, as we unravel how even a 160,000 neuron connectome is enough to make these terrors of rotting plant matter do their wonderful things.
Nintendo has made many game consoles in its long history — one that famously overlaps that of the Ottoman Empire — but only one of them was ever Super. It’s that console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, that [Inkbox] has decided to delve deeply into as he crafts a game in assembly using all the hardware tricks he can.
Hardware tricks he’ll need, given he’s limited to the two 64 kB RAM banks and 3.58 MHz Ricoh 6502-based CPU. Even the 4 MB limit he sets for a historically-accurate homemade cartridge seems positively claustrophobic by modern standards. The game he’s after making is a top-down adventure game a la Zelda, and [Inkbox] gets right into the weeds explaining how the SNES works as he shows his work in this nearly hour long video. If you’re looking for a deep dive into the architecture, along with how it is meant to be used, you could certainly find worse sources. Everything from the different graphics modes to what registers handle sound are covered in this and the previous video in the series.
We can’t help but call out his dedication to open source — the SNES Sound Engine he has put up on GitHub looks like it could be a real asset to anyone else doing this kind of homebrew. The game itself is on itch.io and is pay-what-you-want.
Once upon a time, you had to carefully budget your microcontroller’s resources if you wanted to do something as simple as flash a bunch of LEDs. These days, they’re powerful enough to humiliate the game consoles of yesteryear. [alexkid77] demonstrates this well, having the ESP32-P4 run Tomb Raider.
Now, [alexkid77] hasn’t gone so far as to create a PlayStation emulator on the ESP32 or anything quite like that. Instead, this is a port—and not of the original Tomb Raider release, either. [alexkid77] started with OpenLara—the classic game running in an open-source engine. With the ESP32-P4 having two cores running at 400 MHz each, there was plenty of processing power on tap to run the engine with a software renderer at 320×240, which is hardware scaled up to 1024×600 via the Pixel Processing Accelerator (PPA) built into the chip. There’s also stereo audio with an ES8311 codec hooked up, while input is via a USB HID keyboard.
It’s funny to think that it could actually be cheaper and quicker to get Tomb Raider running on an ESP32 and a cheap LCD display versus actually going out to buy a PlayStation and an original game disc. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles in 2026. At least you don’t have to play it on an S3 Verge.
Want to feel the heat of nearby fire, explosions, or radiation? Or even just the gentle warmth and breeze of a sunny day in the wasteland? If you said yes, you’re in luck because [GingasVR] created an immersive heat mod and wind mod for the VR version of Fallout 4 that leverages economical smart outlets and game scripting to do just that.
The heart of this hack lies in gluing two things that don’t normally go together. In this case [GingasVR] uses a bit of game scripting to control TP-Link HS100 or HS110 Smart Plugs, allowing virtual events to control things in the real world. An ordinary fan in a smart plug creates wind on demand, and heat comes from a 250 watt infrared heat lamp aimed toward the player. For heat, an IR lamp is the way to go because it’s highly directional, can be quickly cycled on and off, and responds rapidly.
The range of immersive effects opened up by this is pretty compelling. Sunny weather yields a gentle glow of warmth, but nearby explosions cause a short full-blast flash of heat. The heat of fires also grows and fades with proximity. This being Fallout, [GingasVR] ensured local radiation has an effect on the heat level as well. Want to see it in action? She briefly explains around the 3:20 mark in this video.
Using ordinary appliances and smart plugs controlled from within VR to modify environmental effects is clever, and we like that it’s entirely nondestructive. The scripting mod for the game doesn’t overwrite any game files, and the hardware used requires no modifications.
The introduction of optical media in the form of CDs meant a revolution in the world of gaming consoles, escaping the restrictions of a few dozen MB of storage and instead offering a theoretically infinite amount of storage through the miracle and tedium of swapping discs. After the SNES narrowly escaped getting a CD add-on and the N64 doubled down on cartridges, we can now at least get an impression of what it’d be like if the Nintendo Entertainment System had been gifted a CD add-on back in the 1980s, courtesy of a project by [Throaty Mumbo].
The NES future we could have had.
There’s also an accompanying video containing typical hijinks and a demonstration of this system. Initially [Throaty Mumbo] was going to make a SNES CD add-on to match that console’s initial prototype, but doing it for the NES seemed more fun. Obviously, since the NES is quite limited hardware-wise it was always going to be a struggle, even if the original front-loading NES conveniently has a mostly unused expansion slot.
On the custom PCB there is an RP2350B microcontroller that mediates between an Everdrive N8 Pro cartridge and an IDE CD drive, along with a PCM5102 audio DAC. The expansion port is hereby used to receive the audio samples on its audio mix input pin, along with power. After boot the game ROM is read off the CD by the MCU and streamed over USB to the Everdrive.
[soiboi soft]’s vacuum-driven dot matrix display is part suction gripper, part touchscreen, and altogether impressive. Its display capabilities are entirely shadow-based, with each pixel being made of a cavity behind a flexible silicone sheet; when the display’s microfluidic logic circuitry activates a pixel, a vacuum pump pulls the sheet inwards, creating a visible hollow.
As in previous iterations, the display’s control circuitry is built around a pneumatic “transistor”, which allows an air channel to be opened or closed by applying vacuum to a control channel. As a first test, [soiboi soft] built a 16-pixel dot matrix display. Eight control channels – four row and four column channels – are multiplexed to individually control each pixel. The transistors act like one-way valves, so the pixels hold their state, even when pressed in by hand; simply add some circuitry to read a pixel’s state, and it would be a fully-functioning touchscreen. The supporting pneumatics also got an upgrade; the solenoid valves now cleanly mount to the back of the board, and the vacuum pump connects via a Luer lock adapter.
The 3D printing used to make certain parts and silicone molds caused issues when scaling up to a 64-pixel display, however. The parts were warping, destroying the seal necessary to keep pixels “on”. To straighten them out, [soiboi soft] pressed the printed part against a flat glass build plate in a vacuum bag and annealed it at 60 Celsius for several hours. This worked quite well, particularly when slightly raised rings were printed around the area to be sealed. Once all these bugs were worked out, the display was clear and decently responsive. [soiboi soft] was able to display letters, numerals, and animations, and even able to play Pong and Snake. It won’t be setting any refresh rate records, but it was nevertheless fully usable.
For another approach to playing Snake with microfluidics, check out this project. If printing molds and casting silicone seems too fiddly, there are always other ways to make microfluidic circuits.
There’s a niche genre of text adventure that’s halfway between a traditional novel and a videogame. Think Zork if it had an extra few novels worth of words of well-crafted story to go with the action. [t0mg] is a fan of such adventures, and also quite enjoys carrying around his palm-sized ESP32 powered Xteink e-ink reader, so decided to create a project to merge the two interests, called eeink.
The Xteink readers have gotten popular lately because their modest internals and size make them very affordable. Not to mention hackable, since they’re basically an ESP32-C3 e-ink dev board that comes with a nice case and battery. The X4 Pro notably comes with an ESP32-S3 which means a lot more RAM, but this project targets both that and the X3/X4 that use the C3 version. Using the C3 means working within some rather stringent limits, as Xteink didn’t spring for any PSRAM, so [t0mg] had less memory to work with than folks did in the 80s.
This project is specifically focused on adventures using the scripting language ink, and comes with its own IDE called eenky to roll your own choose your own adventure book. It’s all on GitHub under an MIT license, and if you want to see it in action there’s a demo video embedded below.
Printed circuit boards were developed first for function over form. They were a way to mount components and connect them in a stable, robust fashion, while taking into regard things like packaging and cooling requirements to enable a circuit to function. Circuit boards often end up looking cool in a techy kind of way, but their aesthetic is usually very much secondary to their actual purpose.
Katrin Dietzsch likes to use her PCBs a little differently, however. She designs boards that are intended to be a narrative tool for tabletop roleplaying, and came down to Hackaday Europe 2026 to walk us through the development of this very whimsical hardware.
Roll For It
Katrin starts her talk by explaining how she came to design circuits specifically for tabletop gaming. She saw an opportunity to combine her hardware hobby with the world of TTRPGs to help maintain both hobbies amidst a busy lifestyle. She also found that hardware she built could be a great artistic medium for supporting mystery and storytelling in the tabletop world. With the right design, her circuits became very much part of the narrative themselves.
Getting to see Katrin’s PCB D20 is a highlight of the talk. It’s a great example of creative board design.
How does one create a piece that becomes special, rather than just being another art project thrown in a drawer, though? Katrin notes that meaningful objects are the ones that gather stories about them and gain emotional baggage, and thus, relevance. Interaction is also key; she relates the familiar tale that many of us have yelled at a printer before. We often anthropomorphize objects or assign them personalities just because they have some level of strange behaviour, or even if they just blink at us. Often, she’ll also start a build not from specs, but from story and the game itself. The questions asked are about how to engage players, and how to help them reach their goals, and answering those can help guide the design process.
There are also elements drawn from typical ideas around magic and artifacts that can be drawn from. For example, many tabletop roleplaying games feature the concept of attunement, where a character may have to physically and spiritually connect with an object to access its magical features. This is something that can be readily recreated in the electronic world with the use of things like capactive touch sensing. Katrin also notes that using RF can be great for creating items or puzzles that respond based on proximity, and there is all sorts of fun to be had with things like IR beams, motors, switches, or whatever else players can interact with. Code is also a beautiful place to hide secrets and easter eggs—you get to write the behaviour of the device to be as beguiling and confounding as you like.
You could use paper maps… or perhaps you could whip up a PCB with traces and solder mask and silkscreen and interactivity all woven together to create something altogether more compelling and interactive. There are grand possibilities in this space for your tabletop game to transcend the usual.
There’s also the visual side of things. It’s something that should be remarkably familiar to anyone who has been to a modern hacker or maker convention and seen the wonderful variety of badge designs created by the community. Everything from the copper layers to the silkscreen to the very routing of the fiberglass board itself can be leveraged to create an art piece that captivates and inspires. Particularly in this era when it’s so easy to find board houses that will produce your designs with soldermask in all the colors of the rainbow. Katrin’s wonderful D20 PCB serves as the perfect example of these techniques being applied well.
Like any good tabletop aficionado, Katrin has a great sense of practicality too. There’s no point designing some fantastic electronic gizmo for your game if you can’t afford the bill of materials, can’t solder the parts, or your players can’t figure out how they’re supposed to use an in-circuit programmer to interact with it. Most of us live very busy lives, so our hobby projects have to be achievable within the constraints of our lifestyle. She also notes that it’s great if you build something with longevity, rather than something that serves only as a single-use tchotchke for a one-off bit.
If you’ve ever contemplated bringing your electronics skills to bear in your role as a dungeon master, Katrin’s talk is a great place to start. Your little creations can serve as a wonderful bridge between your player’s experience and the world of imagination you’re collectively creating, and that’s always a fun time!
Large language models (LLMs) are generally thought of as machines that accept textual prompts and spit out textual content. However, if you’re creative in the way you interface with them, you can get them to do a wider range of tasks. For example, [Andrea Ricci] figured out how to get one to play DOOM.
For this project, [Andrea] began by porting the game to the SCINTIX P4. It’s a rather interesting device, being a single board designed in the Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 form factor, but carrying an ESP32-P4 and an ESP32-C6 instead. The game runs on the P4 and is displayed on a 1024×600 MIPI DSI panel, but it’s only stepped through a few frames at a time. These frames are then passed to Claude Sonnet via a WebSockets setup. With only the same information as a human player would get, the LLM has to figure out what it’s looking at, and then respond with movement and fire commands to play the game.
It’s quite interesting to watch the system play—the LLM mostly accurately describes the game world, navigates down corridors, opens doors, and shoots at enemies. There is a bit of work behind the scenes to enable it to see and understand the game world—namely, using a depth fan across the field of view so it can figure out where walls are and how not to bang into them. There’s also an ASCII automap used to allow the system to keep track of where it has already been. But fundamentally, the LLM is playing the game without any other sort of additional assistance.
We’ve seen some other great ways in which AIs have been whipped up to play various games, like Trackmania.
After previously putting a very basic version of Minecraft on the Game Boy Color, [Tobi] decided to have some fun and port that version also to the Super Nintendo (SNES), just to see what would happen with its more powerful hardware. Even without using an add-on chip like the Super FX 3D chip that made games like Star Fox and Doom possible with its 3D-rendered geometry, the basic SNES hardware can already provide a serviceable Minecraft experience.
You can download the SFC file here, featuring a starting world in which you can do all the usual Minecraft-ing shenanigans, like world destruction and construction. Unsurprisingly the game’s resolution is much higher than on the GBC, though the brief glimpse [Tobi] shows of Minecraft on the Game Boy Advance (GBA) with its proper 3D-rendering hardware are leaps ahead of what the basic SNES can do.
This of course raises the question of what Minecraft on the SNES could look like once you add the Super FX or similar 3D accelerator chips for the SNES into the mix. Rather than just being limited to sprite-based graphics and transformations, suddenly you can use real polygons.
The Steam Controller is a device capable of many interesting feats. It’s intended to act simply as an input device, and yet, it can run games all on its own. As [Owen Feldman] has demonstrated, by having the Steam Controller play Zork.
[Owen] took quite an interesting route to get the there: he wrote a Rust program to emulate the Intel 8080 CPU and CP/M, as one does. This was ported to the Steam Controller, which emulates the CPU and memory on its own internal processor. I/O is streamed over USB, since the Steam Controller lacks a keyboard or screen. The CP/M disk lives in the controller, but the Zork disk data is streamed over USB as well.
If you’re wondering how [Owen] got all this running on the controller, he explains on his personal website. He used what appears to be an undocumented tool included with Steam that allows flashing firmware on the device. Helpfully, Valve also include the original firmware in the same folder, unsigned and only relying on a simple CRC checksum. [Owen] bricked his controller a couple times experimenting with this tool and loading his own firmware, but all came good in the end.
The Steam Controller is probably the oddest device to run CP/M for a while, but hey—it’s a neat party trick. Not much is going to top the auto-docking hack from a few months ago, though.
For as popular as Atari was in their heyday, it wasn’t until well after they were on their famous decline that they released their first handheld, the Atari Lynx. In retrospect, competing with the Game Boy was not going to be a recipe for success even without considering their other problems as a company, and as a result was their penultimate console before exiting the market completely. But [Nick]’s most recent project asks what the world would have been like with an Atari handheld from their golden era, and has been working on this miniaturized version of the 2600.
Unlike any modern emulators which can easily handle Atari 2600 games in almost any form factor today, this console is doing it all with as much original hardware as possible. It uses much smaller switches and buttons compared to the original, and omits some other unnecessary hardware for today’s world like the RF modulator. [Nick] has also designed a custom PCB that reduces the overall footprint considerably as well, and has relocated the cartridge port in preparation for its eventual handheld shape. The result is a console using original hardware that’s less than half the footprint of the original.
Although there were around 30 million Atari 2600 consoles sold and the system is unlikely to be a real collector’s item anytime soon, [Nick] makes sure to note that no real 2600 hardware was harmed in this build. And, as far as its handheld nature, this is a stepping stone on the path to that eventual goal. We’ll look forward to an eventual system that integrates a screen and controller as well as a port for the original cartridges. In the meantime, here’s another handheld 2600 that fits completely inside one of those cartridges.
Login
