“Video Game TiVo” Revised for Production
So over the last couple years I’ve been building different variations on this thing for my client/buddy Cory. It’s had many names but the one we tended to call it the most often was the “Video Game TiVo”. It’s basically an AVR with a ton of Atmel Dataflash as well as some Vregs, level translators, and RS-232 chips.
The idea with these guys is that they sit around on a video game controller and log what the user is doing, and then spit that biz back out when you tell them to. The original ones simply hung out watching or asserting the actual switch lines using WPUs and the like, and as time went by they began to actually replace the controller interface entirely and deal exclusively with serial. Depending on the game system, they can sometimes play a game back deterministically, but mostly not because of RNG and/or timing issues. Either way, they’ll record MONTHS of game and can loop arbitrarily, etc etc. They also have a fancy terminal built in for communicating with a PC and recognizing different video game consoles.
Cory wanted them so he could throw infinite gutterballs in Playstation Bowling games. They do that just fine :-)
This one was tested on a PS1 and the canonical bowling.
This January I had geared up to finally make a TON of them so Cory could just have them handy and not need to call me when he needed one, and this was the final test run before we went into production.
Tags: Art Shiz, AVR Programming, C Programming, Contract Work, Cory Arcangel, Video Game Crap