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Benjamin Heckendorn | |
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Born | |
Website | BenHeck.com |
Benjamin J. Heckendorn (born October 19, 1975) is an American console modder and Computer engineer. He is better known as Ben Heck on the Internet. Heckendorn is also an independent filmmaker and he was the star of element14's The Ben Heck Show, a popular online series, until leaving the show in late 2018.
He has two podcasts, one which he runs with the help of a friend, Jason Jones, [1] and the other on Warpath.TV with George Force, Mike Zucker, and Anthony Carboni. [2]
Most of Heckendorn's mods are done by taking apart old video game consoles such as the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System. He then reconfigures internal printed circuit board (PCB) into a smaller form factor. The newly configured circuit board is enclosed within a custom case (done by a CNC machine) and any peripherals are assembled by Heckendorn.
His creations have been featured in such publications as Wired , Popular Science , and Maxim , and on television shows such as The Screen Savers , Attack of the Show!, and X-Play . His mods are also commonly presented on popular blogs such as Engadget. [3]
He had an interest in electronic and video games as a child, as a young man in film-making and in later life while working as a graphic artist he made a GeoCities site covering his project to make a portable Atari 2600, this led to an appearance in 2004 on The Screen Savers (following the temporary injury of the normal maker Yoshi) and then to a book deal and requests for custom electronics creations to YouTube videos in 2010. [4] In 2015 he restored the only known surviving Sony/Nintendo Play Station prototype console, the Super NES CD-ROM. [5] [6]
Heckendorn has created a line of portable Atari systems, almost always using some form of Atari 2600 board cut up into a smaller PCB. The only exception is the Atari Jaguar "64-Bit" Portable and the Atari 800 laptop. He has also turned two Atari 800 computers into laptops.
Heckendorn has created five (3 NESp's) Nintendo portables:
Heckendorn has made three Sony portables, a "laptop" version of the PS3 based on the Slim version, and a "PS360" controller, which is a PlayStation 3 controller built into an Xbox 360 controller's shell.
Heckendorn has made four combo system to date.
In February 2005, Heckendorn released his book Hacking Video Game Consoles, published by Wiley Publishing Inc. and printed under their ExtremeTech line. It contains step by step instructions for creating two Atari 2600 portables, two NES portables, two SNES portables, and two PlayStation portables, each in hand-built and CNC-cut designs.
On December 13, 2006, Heckendorn started benheckpodcast.com, a website for storing all of his podcasts. In addition, posts are made detailing all the projects he is currently working and the projects he has worked on in the past.
Heckendorn's other podcast is entitled Sonic Boom, and is available on the Warpath.TV digital network. This podcast is no longer in production.
Heckendorn is also an amateur film maker. He has completed 6 films since 1995, including his comedic love story, Port Washington, released in 2006. His most recent movie, released on October 31, 2008, was entitled Possumus Woman, and is the sequel to his 1995 film, Possumus Man. All of his films have been released independently.
Films | |||
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Year | Film | ||
1995 | Possumus Man | ||
1996 | Adventure! | ||
1999 | The Adventurous | ||
2000 | The Lizard of Death | ||
2006 | Port Washington | ||
2008 | Possumus Woman | ||
Ben Heck starred in a weekly online TV program called element14's The Ben Heck Show, hosted on YouTube and the element14 Community. [8] As of June 2016, the show had recorded more than 33 million views worldwide. [9] A typical episode has Ben creating a new product or hacking existing devices, such as an Xbox, for different uses, sometimes based on viewers' suggestions. [10] [11] [12]
As the host of element14's The Ben Heck Show, Heckendorn has made celebrity appearances as an attendee or judge at numerous industry events and competitions, including Maker Faire Detroit and Engadget Expand. [13] [14]
It was announced during an interview with an Element14 Community member that Ben would be leaving The Ben Heck Show after June 2018. [15] The Ben Heck Show was replaced with Element14 presents, a similar show featuring a new cast of hosts.
The Atari 7800 ProSystem, or simply the Atari 7800, is a home video game console officially released by Atari Corporation in 1986 as the successor to both the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200. It can run almost all Atari 2600 cartridges, making it one of the first consoles with backward compatibility. It shipped with a different model of joystick from the 2600-standard CX40 and Pole Position II as the pack-in game. Most of the announced titles at launch were ports of 1981–1983 arcade video games.
A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to a television or other display devices and controlled with a separate game controller, or handheld consoles, which include their own display unit and controller functions built into the unit and which can be played anywhere. Hybrid consoles combine elements of both home and handheld consoles.
A game controller, gaming controller, or simply controller, is an input device or input/output device used with video games or entertainment systems to provide input to a video game. Input devices that have been classified as game controllers include keyboards, mouses, gamepads, and joysticks, as well as special purpose devices, such as steering wheels for driving games and light guns for shooting games. Controllers designs have evolved to include directional pads, multiple buttons, analog sticks, joysticks, motion detection, touch screens and a plethora of other features.
A console game is a type of video game consisting of images and often sounds generated by a video game console, which are displayed on a television or similar audio-video system, and that can be manipulated by a player. This manipulation usually takes place using a handheld device connected to the console, called a controller. The controller generally contains several buttons and directional controls such as analogue joysticks, each of which has been assigned a purpose for interacting with and controlling the images on the screen. The display, speakers, console, and controls of a console can also be incorporated into one small object known as a handheld game.
The history of video game consoles, both home and handheld, had their origins in the 1970s. The concept of home consoles used to play games on a television set was founded by the 1972 Magnavox Odyssey, first conceived by Ralph H. Baer in 1966. Handheld consoles bore out from electro-mechanical games that had used mechanical controls and light-emitting diodes (LED) as visual indicators. Handheld electronic games had replaced the mechanical controls with electronic and digital components, and with the introduction of Liquid-crystal display (LCD) to create video-like screens with programmable pixels, systems like the Microvision and the Game & Watch became the first handheld video game consoles, and fully realized by the Game Boy system.
Homebrew, when applied to video games, refers to games produced by hobbyists for proprietary video game consoles which are not intended to be user-programmable. The official documentation is often only available to licensed developers, and these systems may use storage formats that make distribution difficult, such as ROM cartridges or encrypted CD-ROMs. Many consoles have hardware restrictions to prevent unauthorized development.
The Atari Flashback series are a line of dedicated video game consoles designed, produced, published and marketed by AtGames under license from Atari SA. The Flashback consoles are "plug-and-play" versions of the Atari 2600 console. They contain built-in games rather than using the ROM cartridges utilized by the 2600. Most of the games are classics that were previously released for the 2600, although some Flashback consoles include previously unreleased prototype games as well.
A video game accessory is a distinct piece of hardware that is required to use a video game console, or one that enriches the video game's play experience. Essentially, video game accessories are everything except the console itself, such as controllers, memory, power adapters (AC), and audio/visual cables. Most video game consoles come with the accessories required to play games out of the box : one A/V cable, one AC cable, and a controller. Memory is usually the most required accessory outside of these, as game data cannot be saved to compact discs. The companies that manufacture video game consoles also make these accessories for replacement purposes as well as improving the overall experience. There is an entire industry of companies that create accessories for consoles as well, called third-party companies. The prices are often lower than those made by the maker of the console (first-party). This is usually achieved by avoiding licensing or using cheaper materials. For the mobile systems like the PlayStation Portable and Game Boy iterations, there are many accessories to make them more usable in mobile environments, such as mobile chargers, lighting to improve visibility, and cases to both protect and help organize the collection of system peripherals to. Newer accessories include many home-made things like mod chips to bypass manufacturing protection or homemade software.
Import gamers are a subset of the video game player community that take part in the practice of playing video games from another region, usually from Japan where the majority of games for certain systems originate.
The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles. It was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detailed launch and game information announced later that month at the 2005 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).
The 2000s was the fourth decade of the video game industry. It was a decade that was primarily dominated by Sony, Nintendo, newcomer Microsoft, and their respective systems. Sega, being Nintendo's main rival in the 1980s and 1990s, left the console market in 2002 in favor of returning to third-party development, as they once were. Overall the decade saw the last of the low resolution three-dimensional polygons of the 1990s with the emergence of high definition games, and often focused on developing immersive and interactive environments, implementing realistic physics, and improving artificial intelligence. The sixth and seventh generation of video game consoles went on sale, including the PlayStation 2, Wii, Xbox, PlayStation 3, Game Boy Advance and Xbox 360. Notable games released in the 2000s included Half-Life 2, Wii Sports, Grand Theft Auto III, The Sims, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Super Mario Galaxy, the Halo trilogy, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
The seventh generation of home video game consoles began on November 22, 2005, with the release of Microsoft's Xbox 360 home console. This was followed by the release of Sony's PlayStation 3 on November 17, 2006, and Nintendo's Wii on November 19, 2006. Each new console introduced new technologies. The Xbox 360 offered games rendered natively at high-definition video (HD) resolutions, the PlayStation 3 offered HD movie playback via a built-in 3D Blu-ray Disc player, and the Wii focused on integrating controllers with movement sensors as well as joysticks. Some Wii controllers could be moved about to control in-game actions, which enabled players to simulate real-world actions through movement during gameplay. By this generation, video game consoles had become an important part of the global IT infrastructure; it is estimated that video game consoles represented 25% of the world's general-purpose computational power in 2007.
In video games and entertainment systems, a motion controller is a type of game controller that uses accelerometers or other sensors to track motion and provide input.
The Atari 2600 hardware was based on the MOS Technology 6507 chip, offering a maximum resolution of 160 x 192 pixels (NTSC), 128 colors, 128 bytes of RAM with 4 KB on cartridges. The design experienced many makeovers and revisions during its 14-year production history, from the original "heavy sixer" to the Atari 2600 Jr. at the end. The system also has many controllers and third-party peripherals.
The Super NES CD-ROM, internally known as the Super NES CD-Rom System in the West and as the Super Famicom CD-ROM Adapter in Japan, is an unreleased add-on for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) video game console. Commonly known as the SNES-CD, it was built upon the functionality of the cartridge-based SNES by adding support for a CD-ROM-based format known as Super Disc.
Hyperkin is an American video game peripheral manufacturer and distributor, founded in 2006, based in Los Angeles, California. They distribute accessories for major gaming consoles, in addition to creating clone consoles that play retro games with modern resolutions and on modern devices, most notably the RetroN series of clone consoles. As with most other NES clones, Hyperkin's NES clones suffer from imperfect sound due to a design flaw in the sound hardware.
In the video game industry, the market for home video game consoles has frequently been segmented into generations, grouping consoles that are considered to have shared in a competitive marketspace. Since the first home consoles in 1972, there have been nine defined home console generations.
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