Partially-anonymous maker Louis H., also called “iodeo,” has designed a tool that brings a complete new lease of life to classic Minitel terminals — by turning them into sport consoles.
“Assuming the Minitel was a online game console, the MiniPlay could be its sport cartridge,” Louis explains of the compact machine. “I am all the time excited about reusing the Minitels as they’re a lot of them going to trash in France. Someday, I had the the concept to reuse it as a retro sport console. And having a cartridge for that use case makes it so actual!”
Launched again in 1982, the Minitel system noticed keyboard-based terminals with cathode-ray tube (CRT) shows speaking over dial-up traces to central databases for all the pieces from movie occasions and inventory quotes to — as Louis factors out — interactive video games. The delivery of the web put paid to these dial-up providers, although, and now Minitel machines are successfully ineffective — to all however hackers and tinkerers, after all.
“When you concentrate on it, Minitel video games already existed however you needed to pay costly name charges to play them,” Louis muses, “so this cartridge would have been tremendous cost-effective for customers. For certain, this cartridge will make me wealthy, however in a previous that by no means existed…”
The cartridge is powered by a Microchip ATmega328P, working video games written within the Arduino IDE. (📷: iodeo)
The MiniPlay is a compact machine that slots right into a suitable Minitel terminal’s DIN port, holding a single sport on a Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller — developed, for ease, within the Arduino IDE. “Every sport corresponds to at least one cartridge shade,” Louis writes, “beginning with [a] 2048 sport in orange. Extra video games to come back!”
Assembled MiniPlay cartridges can be found on Louis’ Tindie retailer at $21.50 every; the supply code for 2048 and an upcoming Pong clone is on the market on the challenge’s GitHub repository below the reciprocal GNU Common Public License 3.
