Microsoft’s Xbox 360 add-on has been a hit not just with gamers but with modders and hackers as well. While only a few of its launch games are truly unique and imaginative – Dance Central and Kinectimals come to mind – more and more people are discovering a variety of non-gaming related purposes for Kinect, from rendering a person invisible to controlling drones. Zahoor Zafrulla and his colleagues at Georgia Tech College of Computing have found another possible use for Kinect, hacking it to help teach American Sign Language to deaf children.

This time though, Zafrulla and his team are actually working on a game, which they call CopyCat. In fact they were working on it even before Kinect came out, but back then they had to make do with accelerometers mounted on gloves. The Kinect’s advanced skeleton-detecting features allowed them to ditch the gloves and continue working on more complicated American Sign Language gestures.

Here’s a look at the hack:



Source technabob. ...

[Peter Skaarup's] been re-living the past by playing old-school games in DOSBox. He’s using a mouse as the controller but longed for the auto-fire button that many joysticks used to have. Instead of looking around for a gamepad with this feature he decided to add an auto-fire button to the mouse. He incorporated a PIC 10F200, along with a momentary push switch and a transistor. The push switch enables the autofire feature, causing the transistor to short the left mouse button about seventeen times a second. Problem solved, and with a couple of other pins on the microcontroller there’s room for this project to grow.

Interested in an auto-fire feature for your gaming console? Perhaps this Xbox 360 rapid fire mod will give you some inspiration.

Source:hackaday ...

News via http://www.romhacking.net/forum/inde...pic,11914.html

Aeon Genesis has released a complete translation for the SNES RPG “Ancient Magic”. A godawful amount of work went into this, probably more than was worth it, but it’s a fun little game in its own right. It has some minor plot malleability in some events, and the plot twists towards the end will totally throw you for a loop.

Everything’s done and working, barring one (to our knowledge) tiny cosmetic bug. Enjoy!

This is just the first of hopefully three releases coming this holiday season from AGTP. ...

News via http://psx-scene.com/forums/f6/wip-d...tor-ps3-73473/

The author of PS1 and Sega Megadrive emulators has announced his plans for a Nintendo DS Emulator!

Quote:
Anonymous, the now famous developer who recently completed emulators PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 3 on Sega Genesis is back with a new emulator. After a night's work, he offered us an exclusive version of its Alpha-based Nintendo DS emulator DeSmuME.

The emulator is currently in testing phase but you can play 2D games like Yoshi's Island with good fluidity. Anonymous is working on compatibility and accelerate 3D games as well as the inclusion of sound. It will also add a pointer to use the tactile features games, knowing that for now the L3 button enables a pressure on the screen, which is quite useful when a game requires to support it. Backups are functional and a menu selection opens ROMs when the button is pressed R3 to change the game without having to restart the emulator.

Anonymous wants to improve his first emulator before distributing it. You do not find on the internet yet. If you want to help financially so he could buy a PlayStation 3 debug to develop more easily, paypal address is: [email protected]. Here are some pictures of the emulator in action, we will keep you informed of progress of its work during the day.

http://www.ps3gen.fr/exclu-wip-emula...ite-14356.html ...

News via http://hackmii.com/2010/12/open-sour...analyzer-27c3/

We’ve seen a lot of interest in USB in the past few months — a slew of PS Jailbreak clones appeared from an USB trace taken with a $1500 Lecroy USB Analyzer, and marcan wrote a Kinect driver using libusb, based on some USB protocol traces taken with a $1200 Beagle 480 USB analyzer.

To build a decent USB 2.0 protocol analyser you don’t need that many things inside, and the designs aren’t all that much more complicated than the FPGA designs we worked with on the DSi. pytey and I have been discussing hardware USB 2.0 analysis on and off for 2+ years but we have never had the time (or funds) to create a gadget of our own. An opportunity arose when pytey showed me the absolutely fabulous Kickstarter site, where you can help fund fledgeling projects to get them off the ground.

Open-source hardware isn’t a new idea, but it’s not very easy to pull off designs of even modest complexity. Unlike open-source software (which can generally be made with free tools on any household computer, as long as you have the time to learn how to do so), hardware-hacking is … well … expensive, for lack of a better word, and slow. One attempt at making a board will generally take you from 5-500 hours of time to design it, and then a couple of weeks to have a prototyping house make you some PCBs. This will probably cost you $50-$200, and then you still have to buy the parts and assemble the board … assuming you have the right equipment to do so, this can take you another week (not including debugging!).

After you’ve done all that, if all goes well — you end up with one or two prototypes which you can then try to get working, usually involving some combination of firmware and client software on your computer. Unfortunately, you only have one or two boards, so it’s hard to do much collaboration online with people on one design.

pytey suggested that we might try to leverage Kickstarter to help us make the USB 2.0 analyzer a reality — and thus, OpenVizsla was born! This project has allowed us to collect enough funds ahead of time to have a factory make enough prototypes for all our colleagues to work on firmware, HDL and client software to make an open-source USB analyzer happen. We still have to put the work in to design the hardware, but we will have enough cash to be able to buy the parts for our boards in one chunk (achieving significant discounts with quantity), and we will be able to have enough prototypes made at once to justify a factory production run — no more hand-soldering for us! Once we’re done with this, we’ll end up with a design that people can tinker with and extend; there will be a project site that will soon host more details.

It seemed like a bit of a gamble, so we argued back and forth and picked a cash target high enough to ensure we would be able to make at least enough prototypes to have a decent chance of pulling the project off. I could never have expected the popular reaction to it; it seems like we really struck a nerve out there. We even got a couple of celebrities (Stephen Fry, DVDJon) on board, and our ploy to get some major backers (offering the right to directly participate in the early prototyping stages and a spot for a logo) paid off in spades. We even got support from Altium, who donated a couple of licenses of their lovely CAD/CAM software for us to use to speed up our design process.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the idea of playing with USB, I recommend you head over to the Kickstarter page; as of this writing, there’s still 3 days left for you to get in on the OpenVizsla production run.

On to CCC — our Console Hacking table at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin has become somewhat of a fixture there, so we’re trying to reserve some space this year. A few of you have already noticed that we have a “Console Hacking 2010″ wrapup presentation planned; the description’s still a bit vague because our presentation will depend on how much progress we make between now and then. There’s going to be a PS3 surprise though. No questions about the content, please — we’re still busy hacking away over here, so just come see us there or wait for the video! ...

News via http://emu-russia.net/en/

Japanese Sony Playstation emulator has been updated. Changes:
- CPU: Software interruption was supprted.
- CD: The hold time of CdlLocP,CdlLocL was fixed.

http://drhell.web.fc2.com/ps1/index.html ...

News via http://emu-russia.net/en/

Commodore C64 emulator for Sony PlayStation 3 has been updated. Changes:
- Configuration / Settings can now be saved;
- Menu based configuration now supports some of the more common VICE settings;
- Added mouse support;
- Physical keyboard support improved (still some minor bugs). Added positional/symbolic key layout modes;
- Added ZIP and GZIP support;
- Added HUD options for framerate/speed display;
- Added HUD options for Disk/Tape activity;
- Added multiple disk drive support;
- Disk images can be inserted using TRIANGLE + L1/L2/R1/R2 for drives 8, 9, 10, 11 respectively;
- ReSID-FP support has been added, providing significantly better audio emulation;
- Turn up the speakers on this, it's a world of difference;
- Support for various SID models have been added as part of ReSID-FP;
- Maximum resampling under ReSID-FP is now default, using the original 6581R4 model SID;
- Fixed a bug when using compatibility mode. Occasionally TDE was not enabled correctly.

http://emu-russia.net/en/files/emus-ps3/c64/ ...

News via http://emu-russia.net/en/

NES emulator has been updated. Changes:
- this build includes a minor fix for iNES mapper 116 (specifically dealing with savestates) and a whole bunch of minor code cleanup.

http://www.qmtpro.com/~nes/nintendulator/ ...

News via http://emu-russia.net/en/

Sega Genesis/MegaDrive/32X emulator for Sony PlayStation 3 has been updated. Changes:
- the action replay 1.0 cartridge support can be enabled inside the setting. The datel action replay 1.0 for genesis or Megadrive need to be renamed to areplay.bin and put inside "/cart" folder example "/dev_hdd0/game/GENP00001/cart".
- Added ini files reader for all paths like bios , roms , cart , state the GenesisConf.ini can be found inside "/dev_hdd0/game/GENP00001/". You dont have to create any folder Genesisplus can do the job for you. You've just setup all paths inside Genesisconf.ini and run again the emulator. When Genesisplus create all folders for you just use your best files manager or FTP homebrew for send all your roms ,cartridge or bios the bios is optional. By default the GenesisConf.ini use "/dev_hdd0/game/GENP00001" in main path so you can use it or change it .
- Good news The source code is released on http://www.ps3gen.fr

http://emu-russia.net/en/files/emus-ps3/gen/ ...