Restoring High Scores and Twittering

[SavannahLion]

This is just too freaking cool. Why the hell didn't this cross my mind?

Here's the nut shell. Take 1943 and remove the primary Z80 and replace with a socket.

Move the Z80 onto a separate daughter board then wrap an AVR (another type of microcontroller) with a little bit of supporting logic.

Add in an Ethernet interface for kicks.

Write some supporting software to

A) Store the high score table at specific intervals.
B) Restore that high score table into the game whenever the game is powered down/up.
C) Tweet whenever a new high score is achieved.

and voila! You've updated antique hardware with persistent high score table and Ethernet capability.

That, in my book, is just too cool. In theory, it wouldn't take too much tweaking to adapt this to other Z80 based machines. 

Here's the link:
http://spritesmods.com/?art=twitter1943

[Sjaak]

That is absolutely brilliant!

[nox771]

I saw that too on Hack-a-Day.  While the hardware concept might not be too over the top, I think it took some serious time and skill to work out the memory layout and timing to swap out the score table.  The ethernet concept is really neat too, uploading the high scores to a server. 

[Level42]

Very cool indeed, but I would much rather see it play 2 player over the internet instead of doing stupid tweets !!

Now THAT would be brilliant...being able to finally play MB against someone on the other end of the globe who can actually play it a bit

Oh by the way, this is "Made in Holland"

[SavannahLion]

I can't see why not except for latency issues. You don't even need to go so close to the board as this guy, a direct interface substitute on the joystick would work as expected.

[Cynicaster]

Very cool indeed, but I would much rather see it play 2 player over the internet instead of doing stupid tweets !!

Now THAT would be brilliant...being able to finally play MB against someone on the other end of the globe who can actually play it a bit

Oh by the way, this is "Made in Holland"

Never tried this personally, but it may very well do what you're asking.

http://10ghost.blogspot.com/p/mamehub-tutorial.html