Porting Video Games to VHS
A creator developed a custom VHS-based video game system using an FPGA board and microcontroller to enable interactive gameplay. Unlike previous linear VHS games, this setup decodes binary data from the tape to allow for dynamic responses to user input. The project demonstrates various demos, including Super Mario Bros. and Doom, showcasing the potential for complex game development on the medium.
- ▪The system utilizes a DE1-SoC FPGA board and an RP2350 MCU to decode game data and handle controller inputs.
- ▪The VHS tape stores both binary game data and multiple video streams that are processed by the hardware.
- ▪This approach allows for interactive gameplay and dynamic effects, such as background video streams, which were not possible with earlier linear VHS games.
- ▪An in-progress GitHub repository is available for those interested in following the development of the project.
- ▪The creator built this system after finding existing VHS gaming experiences, like ActionMax, to be too simplistic and repetitive.
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| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/10/05/porting-video-games-to-vhs/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:00:16 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-05T11:27:20.645Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-05T11:27:20.645Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | aqgijGZD8_xA · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Porting Video Games To VHS No comments by: Maya Posch October 5, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy Although VHS-based games have existed for about as long as VHS players have sat in millions of living rooms, they always tended to be rather sparse gaming experiences. For example, the ActionMax gaming “console” that [Throaty Mumbo] shows off in his most recent video. You use a zapper to purportedly shoot down on-screen targets in “games” like Sonic Fury. After this disappointing experience, he figured he should probably make his own interpretation of a VHS-based video game. This involves a DE1-SoC FPGA board along with an RP2350 MCU. There’s also an in-progress GitHub repository for those who wish to follow along.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
