VEC9: New Vector Arcade Game
Posted on April 29, 2016A few years ago, Andrew Reitano and Todd Bailey started tinkering with an old Asteroids vector monitor. One thing led to the next, and along with Michael Dooley and an absurd level of know-how, they built a new vector arcade game: VEC 9.
This is quite likely the first new vector arcade game created in 30 years… and it looks magnificent.
Check out our old post about their early work on the project.
Or better yet, visit vec9.com, or Todd or Andrew’s blogs.
VEC9 will be at IndieCadeEast in New York City this weekend (April 29-31, 2016).
Robot 3D Printers To Turn Asteroids Into Spaceships
Posted on April 18, 2016
The company Made In Space, Inc. has received money from NASA to research their Project RAMA: Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata.
They write, “The objective of this study is… to establish the concept feasibility of using the age-old technique of analog computers and mechanisms to convert entire asteroids into enormous autonomous mechanical spacecraft.”
In other words, they’ll use robot 3D printers to re-shape asteroids into mechanical spaceships, moving them into strategic orbits around the planet, or crashing them into bigger, Earth-threatening asteroids.
For a more thorough description of this, and other 2016 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program fund recipients, read “NASA’s Project RAMA Would Use Asteroids to Play Asteroids” at TheDrive.com.
And, here’s the Project RAMA description at nasa.gov.
The Empire Strikes Back Uncut
Posted on December 25, 2015The Empire Strikes Back Uncut is a a fan-made, shot-for-shot remake of the Star Wars classic!
It’s cued up to start at the asteroid field scene here. Spoiler… it’s Asteroids!
For more, visit http://www.starwarsuncut.com/
Asteroids-Titanfall Mashup
Posted on May 15, 2014
Along with the release of Respawn Entertainment and Electronic Arts’s first-person shooter game Titanfall in April, the Titanfall Arcade put their giant fighting battle robot vehicles into three classic Atari games: Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command. These Titans are better armed than our trusty triangle spaceship, so the result is pretty funny.
It seems that the online arcade was a short-lived promotion, but it lives on in YouTube screen captures.
Asteroids: The Movie
Posted on August 19, 2013Extremely Decent beats Hollywood to the punch.
New Game For Asteroids Vector Monitor
Posted on August 10, 2013Some engineering wizards in Brookyln have been working on a wonderful thing. They’ve written a vector generator in VHDL, designed a DAC/amplifier to run an old Asteroids G05 vector monitor, and hashed out the basics for a game in C.
The whole thing is run off a Linux box, with a second VGA screen acting as an HUD. The full game has yet to be written, but what they’ve got running now looks great.
Read all about it on Todd Bailey’s blog, and see some earlier tests of the system (code name VEC9) written up by Andrew Reitano.
Human Asteroids
Posted on May 30, 2013Just when we thought there couldn’t be anything cooler in the world of Asteroids, there’s this:
It’s Human Asteroids, a project by Two Bit Circus for their proposed STEAM Carnival, designed to turn kids on to Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math.
Human Asteroids uses a Microsoft Kinect to track the player in a rolling chair, who becomes the spaceship. Asteroids are projected on the ground with lasers, and the player fires with a smartphone.
The player in the video is Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari.
The STEAM Carnival has a Kickstarter campaign going until midnight on June 2, 2013. If successful (and at the time of writing, they’re close), they plan to take the Carnival on the road at several major west coast American cities.
[UPDATE] This story has been making the rounds today, and Two Bit Circus has just passed its fundraising goal of $100,000, with two days still to go.
Asteroid Belt
Posted on May 16, 2013
Makers, behold: the Asteroid Belt.
An Australian known as cunning_fellow has made an LCD belt buckle that plays “Rock Blaster” (wink, wink). The whole project is extremely well-documented on instructables.com.
In the FAQs, he writes:
Q: It costs more to build than a RasPi and only runs at 16Mhz. Why did you bother?
A: If you don’t understand already there is little I can do to help you.
Read all about it at http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Asteroid-Belt/
Thanks to our friends at Adafruit for tipping us off.
See more Asteroids fashion in the archives.
Asteroids Mini
Posted on March 10, 2013
Here’s the goal: having an Asteroids arcade machine at home, with authentic electronics and true vector display, but which isn’t the size of a refrigerator. Jürgen Müller in Hamburg, Germany, has built just that.
His half-scale Asteroids cabinet uses an original Asteroids game PCB and 9″ vector monitor from a broken Vectrex, housed in a custom-built cabinet. He also built a custom XY driver circuit to bring the Vectrex display up to the drawing speed required by Asteroids.
The project is well-documented on Müller’s website: http://www.e-basteln.de/asteroids/asteroids_intro.html
Scots Propose Blasting Asteroids to Combat Climate Change
Posted on October 08, 2012
The latest in Awesome Actual News Related to Spaceships and Asteroids comes from the Scottish University of Strathclyde’s Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory, where researchers have proposed using asteroid dust to shield our planet from the Sun, reducing solar radiation enough to slow global warming for a bit.
The plan is to push a nearby asteroid — the best candidate being 1036 Ganymed — to Langrange point L1, where the gravitational pull of the sun and the Earth balance each other, and then BLAST THE ASTEROID INTO EARTH-SHIELDING SMITHEREENS.
Now this is what we’re taking about!
What with Scott Manley’s recent HD video of asteroid discovery, AtariAsteroids.net will gladly buy any Scotish astronomer a pint or a dram.
The Atlantic has a good article with more details.
Meanwhile, we’ll be down at Barcade training for when they start hiring on this mission.
