Summary
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. Rather than the simplistic Action Max system that plays exactly the same every time along with a basic light gun feature, this actually allows for interactive gameplay. The video shows that the VHS tape contains both binary data for the game, as well as a number of video streams. This is decoded using the DE1’s composite input, with the RP2350 then acting on the decoded game data and handling input from the controller. With this, interesting effects can be accomplished, such as background video streams for the original Super Mario Bros. Other demos include Night Trap and a variant of Doom that uses prerecorded video segments along with action events requiring you to press a specific button. Since there’s actual bytecode involved, quite a few more options are available for game development that could have been interesting to a 1980s audience. It is hard to imagine how hard it was to get the VCR into homes, only for it to vanish again. You know these fake audio casettes with head in it to provide aux input in car stereos without one? Can something similar be done for VHS tapes? I know the rotating head would make this a huge headache. But there seem to be a plenty of room in the casette body to generate composite signal and transmit it to the head somehow. Still having enough room for esp32 to run the game while receiving controls from bluetooth gamepads. And reasonably sized battery, or even convert power from rotating shafts to charge some supercaps. Outcome: VHS casette that you could put into any VHS player, which would instantly turn it into game console.