Kritik sah

COBOL is not the first language anyone would ever think of when writing a First Person Shooter– after all , it’s the Common Business Oriented Language, not the Common Game Oriented Language. For Youtube-based hacker [icitry] though, that’s the point. The only way to determine if COBOL would be enough to write an FPS game was to do it. Sure, you could rest on your laurels knowing that the language is Turing complete and therefore capable by definition, but what’s the fun in that? Now the pipeline for this game is as hacky as anything– COBOL doesn’t exactly have a robust graphics stack or a lot of libraries for pushing pixles, so he’s outputting each frame of the game as raw bitmap to STDOUT, and letting ffplay assemble the images. Control enters the same way, with the terminal set to raw input and the COBOL program reading STDIN. As for what the images consist of, he’s going for a standard Wolfenstien-inspired raycasting shooter. [icitr...

Although cryocoolers are capable of pretty impressive cooling, for many of them the underlying working principle is simple enough that you do not need any special skills or a big budget to make your own version. Take the Gifford-McMahon cryocooler for example, which works using nothing more than some kind of coolant gas and a piston in a cylinder that you can even 3D print, as demonstrated by [Hyperspace Pirate] in a recent video . The lowest temperature reached across the two prototypes was only -84°C, but this was mostly due to some sub-optimal design choices, such as the use of regular air and a clear acrylic tube to get a good glimpse at the inner workings. The trickiest part of this type of cryocooler is probably that you need to move the piston containing the regenerator between both ends of the cylinder to get a cool and a hot side. That particular problem was solved by using magnets to move the piston externally, which worked beautifully until the problem of using regular com...

A good demo, like [Linus Akesson]’s Sum Ergo Demonstrato , looks like magic to the average hacker. To normies who don’t know the limitations of the RP2350, they don’t see the big deal. To anyone who has spent any time with the chip, though, it’s a series of tricks you cannot help but be amazed by. Fortuanately for us, [Linus] isn’t actually a magician, because while a magician never reveals his tricks, [Linus] has an hour-long video explaining exactly how his demo was accomplished. We’ve embedded both the demo and the explanation below. Even if you aren’t into YouTube, you should check out the demo video, and again– remember this is all on a Pi Pico with only the extra passives required for video-out. Then you can watch [Linus] explain how he did it, which is really best heard in his own words. There are a couple of bleeding-edge tricks on the RISC V core and peripherals that we would hate to misrepresent– especially the clever hack...

If you’ve ever worked with I2C, you know its one of those things that makes working with modern microcontrollers such a pleasure. With a few wires and not many more lines of code, you can communicate with all sorts of hardware such as sensors, displays, and input devices. There are even I2C keyboards out there, although they tend to be a bit pokey — and not in the good way as it pertains to keyboards. But the bt2i2c project from [Roberto Alsina] promises to improve things. With his firmware flashed to a Pi Pico W, you can establish a connection with any standard Bluetooth keyboard and have the keystrokes sent over the wire via I2C. As far as your project is concerned, the input will appear to be coming from a BlackBerry BBQ20/BBQ10 keyboard using the address 0x1F , which means that there’s already plenty of code out there to work with. While [Roberto] explains its not strictly necessary, connecting a ST7789 display to the Pi Pico over SPI will give you some visual fe...

The special 512×384 mode with S3 card installed. (Credit: Bits und Bolts, YouTube) Back in 1996 the 3D gaming market on PC was beginning to heat up, with hot new titles like Tomb Raider coming out that year and requiring much more graphics power than what was needed for old titles like  Doom and  Duke Nukem 3D to experience good graphics. Thus you had to pick some kind of 3D accelerator card to buy. Here a common joke was that of the available options, the S3 Virge GPU was so bad that it was actually worse than running in software rendering, but was this true? Cue [Bits und Bolts]’s investigation to finally put this myth to rest . On software rendering mode a zippy Pentium 166 would struggle to render at 640×480 resolution, so if you wanted more than 320×240, or really knock down graphical fidelity, you had to get that 3D accelerator card. After combining a P166 with an S3 Virge/DX – a minor update to the original Virge – the  Tomb Raider game was...

Unlike resin printers where you generally just pour the fresh resin into the easily accessible vat, FDM printers need to squirrel away at least one spool and its requisite holder somewhere. For bed slingers this generally means a top-mounted spool holder, while for CoreXY enclosed printers they can appear on the sides, top or – inexplicably – on the back. While a side-mounted spool is often convenient, access to the side can still be blocked, in which case you do what [3D Maker Noob] did and over-engineer a fancy top-mounted spool holder . The problem started after converting a Prusa Mk4S to a Core One using the conversion kit, which changes the position of the spool, forcing him to work around not having access to the right side of the machine where the default position is. After a first version using many of the left-over parts of the original Mk4S to create a fancy box-shaped spool holder, he proceeded to upgrade it as detailed in the video. All project files and instruc...