They tried last year with the injection molded plastic part that you could mod and didn’t get enough of them shipped in time. To your point on $1 badges, they gave paper out and people complained (and still complain) for a long time. They felt they spent $300-400 plus travel expenses so they have this idea they should get a special badge. It has an entire culture around it.
Me and a partner designed an insert that fit into that injection molded part and it had games. You could even connect via RS232 if you had the right board and it would print out DEFCON in ASCII then it had whole menu of games.
We sold this add on for $20 at cost to recoup our costs. Sold about 100+ of these add ons.
DEFCON definitely bit off more than they could chew.
We designed our add on around a cheap STM32 series chip and wrote the code ourselves in C. It didn’t have an emulator like this as this is like an entire gaming platform that DEFCON created. But ours was more like DOS level game add on that took us a couple months to make and have produced. We made the stickers ourselves and cut acrylic ourselves.
Me and a partner designed an insert that fit into that injection molded part and it had games. You could even connect via RS232 if you had the right board and it would print out DEFCON in ASCII then it had whole menu of games.
We sold this add on for $20 at cost to recoup our costs. Sold about 100+ of these add ons.
DEFCON definitely bit off more than they could chew.
We designed our add on around a cheap STM32 series chip and wrote the code ourselves in C. It didn’t have an emulator like this as this is like an entire gaming platform that DEFCON created. But ours was more like DOS level game add on that took us a couple months to make and have produced. We made the stickers ourselves and cut acrylic ourselves.