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http://benheck.com/03-16-2010/bill-paxton-pinball

Bill Paxton-themed pinball game.

lazy troll is lazy

Why not build your own, Ben Heck style?

Yes, I realize how madly impractical that is, but you have to admit, you would more than likely have the bitchin-est lappy anyone at your school has ever seen!

you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?

The SNES uses custom chips for most of its functionality. Unless he has access to decapping facilities, taking one apart will provide only limited information.

This might be a stupid question, but is it not very EE-like to do something cool like taking one apart and making his own portable SNES a la benheck?

will they use chip smashers too?

Ben Heck makes his own custom portable Atari 2600 systems all the time.

http://benheck.com/

Speed and turnaround. If this was cheaply available to a home user or at least enthusiastic hobbyist (less cheap, more involved) you could still roll out a prototype and test with a turnaround of a few dozen a day. Further, you could continue reducing the design until you found the smallest space necessary without risking as much money. By its nature, it's most likely quite a bit cheaper once broadly available than PCB services given the difference in the quantity and toxicity of materials. No toxic waste disposal, no huge waste of copper, no supply chain for PCB stock, just some card stock or plastic and some magic xerox ink.

Also, these circuits are flexible. What's the value of flexibility? It increases the durability and portability of your finished product. The deal with printed circuits as well is not to make a PCB where you solder parts onto it. The idea is to actually print the entire circuit onto the material and offload anything which requires soldered components onto the portion of the product which is not required to be flexible. That being said, anything you can lay into silicon which doesn't require exotic materials or nanoscale electromechanical properties can be printed onto any slightly heat-tolerant substrate with this technology. This could include printing a transistor radio into cotton, printing RFID tags directly onto luggage tags (imagine if the airline couldn't misplace your luggage because the luggage cart itself knew what it was supposed to be carrying), a home hobbyist printing out addon chips for their retro hardware (NES in mixed stereo anyone?), printing out a better antenna for your laptop's wifi, printing new control wires onto the back of an e-ink display (say, from Esquire)...

All of this is a way off of course, as they're still talking about printing a molten silver compound onto materials, which doesn't strike me as being the sort of task a home laser printer would be up for, not the least of which would be that it'd completely screw up the duplexer and probably the developer drum. Of course, Xerox developing this ink with a low melting point and reliable crystallization patterns (from TFA) may result in some other breakthroughs whereby this comes home a lot faster. All they need is to find a low-resistance nonmagnetic alloy or conductive polymer which melts at laser printing temperatures and won't gunk up a developer unit. (which may be unobtainium.) Either that or a working material which can be applied by inkjet printers.

I beg to differ.

http://benheck.com/

I can't find any dimensions either. Each one of the modules looks 1.5 to 2 inches in diameter, but it's kind of hard to tell. Here's some pictures of it semi-disassembled.

Ben Heckendorn, has also done something similar for the XBox 360 controller, with left-hand and right-hand versions.

Ben Heckendorn, has also done something similar for the XBox 360 controller, with left-hand and right-hand versions.

Stop pretending like you are justified for piracy. You're aren't. Piracy is a person decision. Man up and just say you want to steal the game. Don't claim that you are forced to steal it. You could buy an XBox 360 or a PS3.

As for a portable XBox 360 - http://benheck.com/

http://benheck.com/ Ben Heckendorn is the guy that made the Atari (and later other console) portables.

Apparently he got tired of making those and was asked by some readers/fans (I think one was an injured US soldier?) to develop some controllers that could be run with one hand. On his main page he has a Guitar Hero foot controller. Not sure if he has any others. Go check out the site if you're interested.

Sony and Toshiba were the direct competitors for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, but Toshiba makes a chip in the Dualshock 3 w/SixAxis controller.

http://benheck.com/03-22-2008/inside-the-dualshock-3-controller#more-356 (I suck at http writing)

Ya.
Just like when Steve Mann was nearrly shot and charged with bomb hoax
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/14/2051228

of with Benjamin J Heckendorn was nearrly shot and charged with bomb hoax
http://benheck.com/Games/Sony_projects/PSp/PSp%20page%202.htm

I don't posabily see how the secerty could of acted diffrant.

i think it has been done before.

I would bet that they don't plan to tell you. MS has been been putting improved heatsinks in 360s manufactured after march/april and they didn't bother to tell anybody about that. I would assume that the heatsink, and not the process shrink is the solution to the overheating problems. It allows them to own up the the red ring problem, offer the warranty and be able to say the problem has already been fixed. See here for more discussion of that, and how to tell if you have the new heatsink or not.

For inspiration, see what Ben Heck's done. He's a console modding god. If you want aftermarket, and are skilled with tools, make it portable!

Oh, and I have to mention his Xbox 360 laptop. Because it rocks.

For inspiration, see what Ben Heck's done. He's a console modding god. If you want aftermarket, and are skilled with tools, make it portable!

Oh, and I have to mention his Xbox 360 laptop. Because it rocks.

For inspiration, see what Ben Heck's done. He's a console modding god. If you want aftermarket, and are skilled with tools, make it portable!

Oh, and I have to mention his Xbox 360 laptop. Because it rocks.

For inspiration, see what Ben Heck's done. He's a console modding god. If you want aftermarket, and are skilled with tools, make it portable!

Oh, and I have to mention his Xbox 360 laptop. Because it rocks.

I don't have a 360 and don't plan to, but if I would buy the 360 laptop this guy created.

This article also reminds me of the Blind Mortal Kombat Master. Which I found particularly interesting because I used to be good enough at MK3 that I would frequently take people on while blindfolded as a party trick; though I would imagine it's much more difficult to learn the game without your vision. Thinking of other games I'm sure the Space Channel 5 Series (originally on the Dreamcast and later on the Gamecube and PS2) would work very well for the blind without any modification, being that it's a Simon says/music driven game.

I've often contemplated how my life would be different if I just lost so much as a thumb or my vision or my hearing etc. Gaming makes up a significant portion of my pastimes and it's physical requirements are steep. I cherish the fact that I have these abilities. I think it's great that there are things out there that would expand the accessibility of games. Though it's a difficult task, and I'd hate to be limited to just MK3 and Space Channel 5 it's nice to know that there are people like Benheck who will make controllers for the one handed and the Audio games for those who are blind. I've been debating trying my hand at developing a small XBLA type game... now I think I might try to design a game that could be enjoyed by the sighted as well as the blind.

Actually I think he's revering to Benheck's recent one handed controller mod for the Xbox 360. IIRC it was built for a war vet who lost one of their arms while serving. It's a really interesting design.

http://www.benheck.com/ - Ben Heck's XBox 360 Laptop. Only one in existance and it probably sold for several thousand considering it cost $1,200 in parts alone to make.

Games like Star Fox are bound by the speed of the SuperFX chip in the cartridge. Someone did manage to overclock it though, right here: http://benheck.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=7680&star t=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

And yes it does increase the frame rate.

See, now I might pick one of these up to complement my PSP. One of the things that kept me from getting a DS was how big and clunky it looked.

DS as it is now is not really that huge in my opinion, it's not much worse than the original GBA, which was a quite reasonably sized thing. (And as for PSP's size, well, when I saw that, I just got horrible flashbacks involving Atari Lynx... =)

I think it's good to have a small and big version of the same thing though. I have big hands. I liked original GB, found the GBC a bit less comfortable to play. GBA rocked, SP was too small. DS is right size for me, but I suppose this one will be too small, again. But for some other people, the size preferences might be the other way around.

One weird thing though, the word is that this thing has a brighter backlit display. What the heck? DS's display is the kind of thing that, while I'm not a religious person as such and don't endorse creationism, even, vividly make me recall Genesis 1:3. I mean, it's bright already.

and yet they want you to stick arround and buy webhosting from them.

Did you try http://benheck.com/$sys$index.html?

This thing is a bit tighter.

If you're into hacking old machines into something new and portable, check out this site.

... then check out Ben Heckendorn's Book that was due to be published this week (the guy behind the portable PS2, Ben Heckendorn).

Surprised no-one on /. has reviewed it yet :) Time to hassle Ben for a review copy...

cLive ;-)

disclaimer - I work for company that hosts his web site (so I must be a masochist by inviting slashdot visitors ;-)

http://www.benheck.com/
-or-
http://www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/

It's not just the PSOne, though: he also has handcrafted hand-held NES, SNES, a brand new PS2, and (the source of the URL and the beginning of all of this madness) a plethora of hand-held VCS units (AKA the Atari 2600.)

This man is amazing! And if I had a few extra hundred dollars just lying around, I'd probably try and buy one of them from him.