4 mins
I just got back from dc32 and I had a great time. This was my 4th Defcon and probably my favorite so far. We had a huge showing from my homestate, we setup a pop up soldering village in the hallway on Thursday (the first day of dc where nothing really happens), gave out a bunch of badges for cool things, met a ton of cool peeps, and so much more. We (hackers from my home state and me) are already planning on amping it up for next year with a hallway con, party, and badge.
The badge is actually what I want to talk about. I've been in #badgelife since my first DefCon (second really but I scored 1 badge my first year). Badges are a huge part of my DefCon experience. I come from a long line of artists so #badgelife is the perfect intersection for me. Some of my favorite moments from this year was giving away Shell on the Boarder badges. I had a bunch of badges literally strapped to my backpack with paracord this year (I scored an 801 badge!!!!) and I had quite a few people come up to me to talk about it. The one I distinctly remember was this person roughly my age (which is weird for me lol) came up to me in the hallway to ask about the badges on my bag. They were super interested in #badgelife and told me it was their first DefCon. I happened to have the last working and flashed badge on me at the time so I gave it to them and I have never seen someone's face light up and get excited that quickly. These are the moments I live for at DefCon.
So badges are essential to my DefCon experience. I'm not usually one who goes for SAOs, usually all they do is light up/blink and I usually go after badges that do something or have some kind of challenge/CTF attached. This year however I sought after DC Punk's RickRoll SAO. This SAO has an spi oled screen, super crunchy speaker, and an rp2040. Is this overkill for an SAO? Yes. Do I love it? Also Yes. While my crew hasn't solitified anything for our badge one of the idea's thats been floated around is a suped up SAO. This is mostly inspired by DC Punk's SAO and most people at DefCon only wear the official badge. We also want our badge to interact with each other in some way. The DC Punk's SAO is roughly the same size as a Dreamcast VMU so I've floated the idea of making something like the VMU our badge. The VMU is a really interesting take on a memory card and I think the formfactor/device was under utilized. Only a few games supported VMU minigames and when plugged into the controller for a second screen (much like the WiiU) few games did anything interesting with it. However, the VMUs could interact with each other without the need for a Dreamcast. Usually this was just transfering save games between devices but there have been some homebrew VMU games that used that interface to implement multiplayer.
The idea is that our SAO could be an arduboy-type device in a VMU-ish formfactor. Or if we use the new rp2350 we could emulate an actual handheld console, this years official DefCon badge used that chip and emulated a Gameboy Color. I floated this idea specifically as a tic80 emulator and got some positive reception from the group but it hasn't been solitified. I've been wanting to make a badge for DefCon for a few years now and even made a prototype for a DreamBerd badge this year and ran out of time. I think I'm going to continue down this VMU thread and if it's not my group's badge it'll be my badge.
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Created: 2024-08-18