Asteroids Controller with Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #piday #raspberrypi
Tim Bartlett‘s gorgeous RPi project brings classic arcade control back to life:
The 1979 arcade version of Atari Asteroids is a beautiful thing.
A white triangle battles lethal polygons on the glowing phosphors of a vector display. The two-note heartbeat of the music is syncopated by the “pew pew pew” of your effort to stay alive. The controls are as minimal as the graphics, and the entire program takes up a mere 8 KB of memory. Yet the game is complex, never the same from one quarter to the next.
I am a fan.
Years ago, I wired up parts from a scrapped Asteroids machine to control a computer via USB. It’s a beast. So when I had access to the resources at NYU’s ITP Camp, I decided to learn some new tools and make a refined desktop version . This one is designed for a tiny Raspberry Pi computer running an arcade machine emulator (MAME), so all you need to provide is power in and audio/video out.
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