When you work with tiny things on the regular, they start to seem normal-sized to your hands and eyes. Then, if you work with even smaller packages, stuff like 0603 might as well be through-hole components.

[alnwlsn] is no stranger to the small, having worked almost exclusively with surface mount components for a few years now. Even so, they’ve built up an admirable stock of DIP chips, including the ATtiny84 DIP-14 that their incredible Simon game is built into.

How in the world did [alnwlsn] accomplish this? As you’ll see in the video after the break, the answer lies in milling, but with the motors disconnected and manually turning the knobs.

Soldering didn’t require anything special, just the usual suspects like a fine-tipped iron, an X-acto knife, some tweezers, and a few other things like a hot air gun for soldering fine wires to the leadframe. Oh, and of course, really steady hands, and lots of patience.

The 2024 Tiny Games Contest officially closed on Tuesday, September 10th. We’ll have the results out as soon as possible. Best of luck to all who entered!

It was probably a reasonable assumption that the “Tiny” in our recently concluded Tiny Games Contest mostly referred to the physical footprint of the game. And indeed, that’s the way most of the entries broke, which resulted in some pretty amazing efforts. [Anders Nielsen], however, took the challenge another way and managed to stuff a seagull-centric side-scroller into just 500 bytes of code.

That’s not to say that the size of [Anders]’s game is physically huge either. Flappy Larus, as he calls his game, runs on his popular 65uino platform, a 6502 microcontroller in the familiar Arduino Uno form factor. So it’s pretty small to begin with, and doesn’t even need any additional components other than the tiny OLED screen which has become more or less standard for the 65uino at this point. The only real add-on is a piezo speaker module, which when hooked up to the I2C data line happens to make reasonable approximations of a squawking seagull, all without adding a single byte of code. Check out a little game play in the video below.

Flappy Larus may be pretty simplistic, but as we recall, the game it’s based on was similarly minimalist and still managed to get people hooked. The 2024 Tiny Games contest is closed now, but if you’ve got an idea for a tiny game, we’d still love to feature it. Hit the tip line and we’ll take a look!

They don’t call slot machines one-armed bandits for nothing. And although it’s getting harder and harder to find slot machines with actual pull-able handles instead of just big buttons, you can easily simulate the handle at home with the right kind of limit switch, as [Andrew Smith] did with this micro slot machine.

This baby slot machine is built around the Adafruit 5×5 NeoPixel grid, which is an add-on for the QT Py. As you’ll see in the brief demo video after the break, the switch actuates on release, which starts the lights a-spinning. [Andrew] says the constraints of the SAMD21-powered QT Py made this a particularly fun challenge.

Whereas most physical slot machines have different reel sequences, this build uses just one. [Andrew] declared hex values to ID each color, and then created the reel manually with different color frequencies. When the lever is released, the columns are animated and slowly to come to rest at a random offset. You can check out the code on GitHub.

One way to keep things tiny is to make a system with cartridges where the brain lives on each cartridge instead of the platform itself. [Michael]’s Epic Minimalist Entertainment System (EMES) is one of those, and boy, is it tiny. EMES makes use of the ATtiny10, and they don’t get much AT-tinier than that.

This nearly microscopic console uses an equally Lilliputian display — a Plessey GPD340 vintage LED display, in fact. (Check out [Michael]’s reverse engineering project if you want to play around with these.) There are four ultra-small buttons for control and a buzzer for sound.

Now, the ATtiny10 is an 8Mhz microcontroller with 1KB of flash and 32 bytes of RAM. It has an 8-bit ADC and a somewhat surprisingly high four GPIO pins. But of course, that’s not enough. Not with the display, the four buttons, and the buzzer, so [Michael] had to come up with a way to multiplex everything to four GPIOs.

PB0 is shared between the buttons and the display’s serial data input. PB1 cleverly outputs the same PWM for both the brightness control and the buzzer. When the buzzer is needed, [Michael]’s code switches to a lower frequency and adjusts the duty cycle of the display to keep it readable. PB2 and 3 are serial clock inputs for the two display halves. Be sure to check it out the heated PONG action in the video after the break!

There’s still a little bit of time to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest! You have until Tuesday, September 10th, so head on over to Hackaday.IO and get started!

So there’s this commercial electronic game out there called Catch Phrase, which, as the game’s own catch phrase explains, is the game that’s played one word at a time. See, a word comes up on the screen, and you have to get the other person or team to guess what it is using gestures and such before the timer goes off. There are a bunch of rules, like you can’t say a word that rhymes, give the first letter, or the number of syllables.

Well, [ahixson1230] and company got their hands on the After Dark NSFW version but found it lacking in the edginess department. So naturally, [ahixson1230] was inspired to build a better one, with a touch screen in lieu of buttons, and a way for players to suggest words to be added to the list. In this version, a player presses anywhere on the screen to start the game, and a random word or phrase comes up. They act it out, get the other person to guess, and then pass the unit over to continue the fun.

Batch Craze is based on the Cheap Yellow Display, aka the ESP32-2432S028R, and [ahixson1230] highly recommends [witnessmenow]’s excellent resource on the subject. As of this writing, [ahixson1230] is still trying to get the speaker to work, and welcomes any help. Can you assist?

There’s still time to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest! You have until Tuesday, September 10th, so head on over to Hackaday.IO and get started!

What is it about tangible media? There’s just something neat about having an individual thing that represents each game, each album, each whatever. Sure, you can have a little console with a thousand games loaded on it, but what’s the fun in that?

Enter the ATtinyBoy. [Bram]’s entry into the Tiny Games Contest is based on the ATtiny85, and the whole thing is smaller than a credit card. In fact, each little game cartridge contains its own ATtiny85, with the pins broken out into headers.

That is, although the schematic is based on [Billy Cheung]’s gametiny, which uses an ATtiny85 as the brain, ATtinyBoy’s brain is divided among each of the games.

This certainly checks a lot of boxes when it comes to contest rules and requirements, and it’s just awesome besides. We particularly like the custom box that holds ATtinyBoy and all his distributed knowledge. If you want to make one of your own, the schematic, code, and STLs are all available over on IO.

Round and round goes the red LED, and if you can push the button when it overlaps the green LED, then you win. Cyclone is almost too simple of a game, and that’s probably part of why it’s so addictive.

Want to make one for your desk? All it takes is an Arduino Nano R3 or comparable microcontroller, an RGB LED ring with 12 LEDs, a 16×2 LCD, a buzzer, and a momentary push button switch.

Interestingly, there aren’t successive levels with increasing speed, but each round begins with a randomized speed value. Of course, this can all be easily changed in the code, which is modified from [Joern Weise]’s original.

This is a tinier version of [mircemk]’s original project, which uses a 60-LED ring and does contain levels. As usual with [mircemk]’s builds, this project is mounted on their trademark 3 mm PVC board and covered with peel-and-stick wallpaper. Be sure to check out the demo and build video after the break.

Don’t forget! You have until Tuesday, September 10th to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest, so get crackin’!

If you think about it, even difficult mazes on paper are pretty easy. You can see all the places you can and can’t go, and if you use a pencil instead of a pen, well, that’s almost like cheating.

However, using a pencil is pretty much a necessity to play [penumbriel]’s Blind Maze. In this game, you can’t even see the maze, or where you are. Well, that’s not exactly true — you can “touch” the wall (or lack thereof) in front of you and to the sides, but that’s it. So you’re going to need that pencil to draw out a map as you go along.

This game runs on an Arduino Nano and a 18650 cell. There are three LEDs deep within the enclosure, which is meant to give the depth of walls. But, even the vision-impaired can play the Blind Maze, because there’s haptic feedback thanks to a small vibration motor.

If you want to play in hard mode, there’s a hidden paperclip-accessible switch that turns off the LEDs. This way, you have to rely on hitting the walls with your head. Be sure to check out the video below.

Usually, if something is tiny, it’s probably pretty cute to boot. [Luke J. Barker]’s lunar navigation game is no exception to this unwritten rule. And as far as contest rules go, this one seems to fit rather nicely, as it is tiny on more than one level.

Moon Base P (for Puppies) is built upon a XIAO ESP32-C3, an SSD1306 OLED display, and a single button to keep the BOM tidy. In this riveting side-scroller which sort of marries Lunar Lander and Flappy Bird, the top bar is always yellow and displays fuel and such, and the bottom is a rough, blue lunar surface over which you must maneuver your lunar lander. Keep pressing the button to stay up and avoid mountains, or let off the gas to cool the engine.

Fly that thing over the terrain, avoiding stray meteors and picking up free fuel, and then land gently at Moon Base P to save the stranded puppies. But you must keep flying — touch down anywhere but where you’re supposed to, and it’s game over! Once you’ve picked up the puppies, you must fly them safely onward to the rescue pod in order to win. Don’t miss the walk-through and demo after the break.

A decade is a long time to carry around a project idea in your head. Fortunately, the Tiny Games Contest happens to coincide with [Senile Data Systems]’s getting back into ATMega programming, so they can finally make their zero-dimensional PONG dreams come true (and have the chance at great prizes, too, of course).

If you don’t already get what’s going on here, zero-dimensional PONG takes 1D PONG and turns it on the short side. Imagine the light coming toward you, then moving away toward your opponent, and you have the basic idea. So, how is this done? Pulse-width modulation controls the brightness of the LED, and, well, you have to be pretty fast, although there is a small margin for the inevitable error.

In the video after the break, you can watch [SDS] play themselves using a red/green LED. Player one must press the button when red is fully lit and green is off, and player two goes when green is fully lit and red is off. The cool thing is that this game uses sockets, so it can use any LED. There are nine difficulty levels to control the PWM speed,  so one can really test one’s reaction time.

If you want to build one of these, you’ll need an ATtiny2313 or something similar, a couple of buttons, a display, and the optional but fun buzzer. The well-commented code is available through [Senile Data Systems]’s site.