A few weeks ago, NYC Resistor had quite a showing at the first Worlds Maker Faire in Queens.  We showed off a number of projects, including Ranjit’s MIDI Player Piano, Mr. Stabby, Raphael’s Twitchies, and Chris’s Cray-on-a-FPGA.  One of the new projects shown was the NYC Resistor Atari 2600 demo, thrown together the night before by me, Ben Combee.

The hardware you see there has a few homebrew components.  The console is an Atari 2600 Jr, the smaller version that was on sale in 1985 through 1990.  I’ve installed an AV modification from The Longhorn Engineer to get composite, S-Video, and stereo audio outputs.  The monitor is an older 21″ Dell unit that has composite inputs.  The demo was running off a Harmony Cartridge, a very cool homebrew development board done by people at the AtariAge website.  It lets you load a bunch of ROM images on a SD card and select which one to run at boot time.  For the Faire, I used a special autorun mode where it would always immediately start with the demo instead of showing the menu.

The app wasn’t written directly in 6502 assembly.  Instead, I used a great development tool called Batari Basic. It’s a BASIC language wrapper around the 2600’s hardware with prewritten display kernels. While you can’t do everything with it, it’s a great way to get an idea up and running on the system.

If you want to download the code or the binary to run in your 2600 emulator, it’s part of the NYC Resistor github depot along with many of our other projects.

Photo Credit: Tekserve

It’s that time of year again! Tekserve in Manhattan is having its sort of annual  eWaste event!  Recycling help provided by the LES Ecology Center.

WHEN: OCTOBER 9TH (THIS SATURDAY) FROM 10 AM to 4PM!

WHERE: 119 W 23RD ST (near 6th Ave)

BRING:  VCR, Computer, CRT/LCD, Fax, Printer/Copier, Television, DVD Player, Radio/Stereo, Telephone, Camera, The Heat (See link for complete details.)

DON’T BRING: Appliances, Microwaves, Stoves, Refrigerators, Air Conditioners, or used Large Hadron Colliders (only small ones.) No bulk business drop-offs!

Prizes, coupons, moar.  No landfills, no poisoning children overseas.

Do you have a product design that you’ve been putting off making for a while, but could blast it out in a jiffy with a 35 watt laser?

Want to make a pile of halloween decorations but hate all that cutting?

Would your loved one appreciate an engraved gift personalized from you?

Come take the laser class! It cuts wood, acrylic, paper, foamcore, leather, acetal, mylar and a lot of other things. It etches aluminum, steel, and glass. We’ll teach you all the basics to get you cutting your own designs.

Click here to sign up for the October 23rd class.

Pinball Hacking!

Juca will speak on building an Arduino-controlled pinball machine from scratch! Topics will cover reverse-engineering the “PARTY Land” game from the 1993 Amiga video game, “Pinball Fantasies.” Many of us pined for our own pinball machines as children – come learn how to roll your own.

When? THIS THURSDAY – 6PM – Coincident with NYCR’s excellent Craft Night!

Speaker: Felipe “Juca” Sanches

• “Pinball Hacker”
• Inkscape and GNU LibreDWG developer
• founding member of Garoa Hackerspace in São Paulo, Brazil

It's hard to imagine that 15 years have passed since Hackers came out. It seems like only yesterday we were grimacing through the bad acting and worse "technology" references that Hackers brought to life.

Whether you love or hate the movie, everyone can agree that the 15th Anniversary Party is the perfect excuse to dress up in ridiculous looking retro clothing and drink with a bunch of other wannabe cyberpunks. In other words, it will be a typical night in Williamsburg.

More information on the party Kickstarter Page