Odyssey:OdysseyNow HAL

Emulators for the Magnavox Odyssey have been created in the past, including one by David Winter and OdySim, by Sylvain De Chantal, a member of the OdysseyNow Facebook group.

Their design philosophy is less about emulating an Odyssey console, and more about "creating digital simulatons of full Odyssey games", by digitzing their analog components and creating digital instead of analog inputs for the system, allowing users to "re-imagine what the Odyssey would be like as a 1980s game system".

The Magnavox Odyssey lives

The Odyssey Now: HAL is a branch of the Odyssey Now project by the Vibrant Media Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Its main goals are to recreate the original analog system on digital media and interface with the original console, doing things with the original hardware that were "unimaginable in the 1970's."

Currently the software is playable as a pseudo-emulation of all of the original console's game cards, controlled with keyboard & traditional gamepad controls, as well as a newly-designed 3D-printed arduino-powered controller that is meant to mimic the original console's controllers.

Interface with the original console is currently limited but the project is in active development. The project's developers have hopes to fully integrate with the original hardware so that one user could play on this simulation and another on the original console -- seamlessly. Expanding on this same methodology, with some networking they hope to have two original consoles playing together over the internet, with their software as middle-man.

Development

OdysseyNow HAL is a project of the Vibrant Media Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. The source code, together with the project's github repo and downloads, can be found at https://pathealy.itch.io/odyssey-now-hal

Links

• Odyssey Now: HAL
• Vibrant Media Lab
• Github - OdysseyNow HAL
• OdysseyNow HAL Community