My son managed to convince mom to install CoC on his iPhone. After watching a little bit, I put it on my HTC. It's pretty cool, although I wonder how Supercell is making any money given lack of IAP pressure and the TV advertising.
IAP - in app purchases, or the way "free-to-play" games make money. In the case of CoC, $$ buys you gems which can be used to:
Instantly complete anything which would otherwise take time to complete. (More time requires more gems.) But if you're willing to w
http://raspberrypi.org
The Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized US$35 Single Board Computer with the following features:
700 MHz ARM11, 1080p OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU with hardware H2.64 decode, 256MB RAM, SDHC slot, HMDI out, 2.0 USB jacks & RJ45 Ethernet port.
From my perspective the biggest attractions are the low price and the HDMI output. I was seriously considering getting one and setting it up to play MAME, but now I have an even better idea: a DVD library.
I jumped on the DVD b
A while back the wall wart for my Netgear wifi router died. I borrowed the one for my external drive as a temporary replacement, but I wanted a more permanent solution. This weekend was the community garage sale and I scored a Linksys WRT54G v4 for $5. This is the router which started the open firmware revolution, but I'm not sure I want to join the revolution.
The problem is I'm more into stability and easy to use than features beyond what the stock firmware provides. Well, there are tw
Although I don't program games for a living, I visit gamasutra.com daily. A common topic in many articles is "free-to-play", from philosophical treatises to in-depth tutorials on how to best convince players to pay-up. Personally I think "free to play" is killing the industry (Nintendo being the current whipping boy) because it disrupts the most direct feedback loop between the creators and the players.
You see, IMHO players should be paying for content, because this is what the programmer
For those of you with PS3s, be aware that the April 1 update disables OtherOS. So after installing the update you will no longer be able to install OtherOS or boot into OtherOS - so no more PS3 Linux. (Of course, the PS3 slim didn't have this ability.) Not upgrading means you will no longer be able to access the Playstation Network.
There has been much discussion on whether this is legal. IANAL, but I suspect it is not and Sony will be forced to either provide compensation (e.g. Playstat
The other day I decided I needed to set myself a goal to work on in Unity. A game project to help focus my self education.
What I settled on is a Battlezone style game. (Not a port - just the basic ideas.)
So one of the things I need is a tank to shoot at. Which means I need to create a model which Unity will then display. While I could download Blender (also free), that seems like overkill for something as simple as a Battlezone tank. What I wanted was something dead simple - an AS
I've done some cycle counting of the display list builder for SpaceWar! 7800 and the results aren't pretty:
103 cycles per display list (25 NTSC, 30 PAL)
403 cycles per player sprite, +191 for horizontal wrap around
248 cycles per non-player sprite, +82 for horizontal wrap around
50 cycles per sprite header vertical wrap around
200+ cycles of overhead
At 114 cycles per raster, just the display list builder is going to chew through all 62 lines of VBLANK.
So, what to do?
1. Optim
A few months ago a few iOS games were released for free on the AppStore, Infinity Blade II being one of them. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough space on my iPhone 4S at the time to complete the download. But I recently unchecked the 2012 C3 panel recordings (to add the 2013 Pinball Expo panel recordings) and freed up enough space to complete the install.
Ghods it's a pretty game.
It looks like a AAA PS3 game. The environment is lush and detailed and the characters are graphically an
The other day I was browsing a warehouse sale which had a few 4K TVs (but no 3D, which I found interesting), and it got me to thinking about them. Not because I want one, but strictly on a why? basis. The local cable company is hyping their 4K TV offering, starting with local baseball and hockey games. But when I'm watching my 55" HDTV, I'm not thinking "boy, I'd pay big bucks to have more picture detail". Maybe if my TV filled the entire wall so HDTV looked like 320x200 VGA on a 21" mon
I did a quick merge of the rest of the 4K SpaceWar! 7800 code so now the ships move & fire again. Of course there were problems - the main one being top-to-bottom wrap around. Turns out there was a bug in the 4K version, it didn't handle it properly either. Although the code wrapped around the display list pointers correctly, it didn't handle the end of display list index correctly. Thus, it tried to add the sprite to display list 0 using index 25, wiping out the display list. Ick!
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/01/report-apple-tv-successor-with-revamped-os-coming-in-first-half-of-2014/
Reading the article this morning I had the question - could an Kinect device make it possible to play touchscreen style games on your home TV?
The problem is the two aren't equivalent. A touchscreen gives visual position feedback and an actual touch input. While a Kinect is a "zero button mouse". The list of existing Kinect games doesn't include ports of most popular touchscre
Greetings to the 20 readers who visited yesterday.The Expensive Planetarium drawn using 256 8x8 pixel tile sprites, with each sprite having 8 "stars" in a quincunx pattern either on or off. (Actually, there are two sets of tile sprites, odd & even, to make up for the 160 positioning in 320 mode.) The actual star map is 90 rows of 256 tiles (each tile is 1 byte). This makes the starmap effectively 2048x720 pixels (360x180 degrees).On the 7800 tiles are drawn using 5 byte DL entries. Each
My second base was semi successful. While the mine bottomed out into lava, it still yielded a few diamonds and other ores; but no emeralds (not that I've seen a village, where emeralds are used for trading). I also found an abandoned mine shaft, complete with a cave spider spawner. Unfortunately, it's difficult to create a automated grinder for cave spiders. I constructed a Nether portal, but discovered it linked to an existing portal so I didn't return to my base. I now better understand
A while ago my son asked when I was going to fix the Tempest cabinet. The fire cleanup crew removed the PC I was using to the Tempest cabinet and insurance wrote it off (although I did get the hard drive back). So the first step is to obtain a PC. MAME is still primarily a single threaded app, so I used https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.htmlto judge different processors. I figured a Core 2 Duo was probably what I wanted. I started looking at the lists of refurbished computers at loc
Via slashdot Team Twiizers (now known as fail0verflow) has made some significant strides in demolishing the security of the PS3. (By discovering a flawed crypto implementation - allowing the private keys to be recovered.)
It makes me wonder if it is possible to implement a truly unbreakable anti-piracy mechanism.
lep20061108.zip
Okay, I've fixed the look-ahead bug which was causing the ladder issues vdub_bobby was noticing. I think you'll find the leprechauns to be a little smarter now. Leprechaun Level Editor updates as usual.
Oh, one note. The AI for swinging on ropes is the same as running with the one exception of falling when the player is directly below. (Note - it may be possible to run under a leprechaun and not trigger this behaviour.) So when the player is higher than the lepre
As my wife often reminds me, I have a habit of not finishing projects once I've started them. (Usually while pointing at one of them.) I have to say that I've gotten better at managing this habit (although not necessarily at finishing projects). I try not to start projects, or at least start spending money instead of just time, unless I have a relatively clear understanding of what it's going to take to finish the project (and why I'm bothering). But i still have quite a few projects hanging
The original PDP-1 SpaceWar! had an accurate starfield, termed the Expensive Planetarium. I want to add the same thing to SpaceWar! 7800. So far I've translated the Yale star information into quincunx sampled tile lists. The current annoyance is the X/Y position to DL entry code. It's not hard code, just annoying and tedious, and I don't seem to have the necessary desire & drive.
from http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/20/xbox-durango-requires-all-games-to-be-installed
"Every Durango console will have a hard drive, although its exact capacity has not been chosen," reads help documentation in the Durango XDK. "It will be large enough, however, to hold a large number of games. All games will be installed on the hard drive. Play from the optical disc will not be supported."
My question is why. I can't think of anything (anti-piracy or anti-resale) which would requ
So Sony has decided to partner with AMD to provide the processing power in the next Playstation console. They are sticking in a single chip eight x86-64 AMD "Jaguar" cores and a AMD next-generation Radeon™ based 1.84 TFLOPS graphics engine backed by 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. The single chip "APU" will likely also include a dedicated video encoding & decoding processors.
My first question is whether 8GB of RAM will be enough (although that's a leap from the 512MB of the PS3 & XBox360) - and
I ended up playing a lot of Minecraft on 2b2t over the long weekend. Once you get away from the chaos of the spawn area (and turn off the chat) the server becomes remarkably peaceful. Maybe I'm just travelling a different direction than most, but I've seen very few large builds; although there is still occasional evidence I'm not the first player to pass this way. Although while wandering though the wilderness may be far better than fending off other players, I decided I wanted to settle do
First, a version of the paddle proof of concept which uses a DLI instead of a pseudo kernal. This increases the amount of CPU time available to the rest of the program at the cost of the number of paddle positions (0-31 for NTSC).Second, a trackball proof of concept. I don't have one myself so I can't test it out. Again, a DLI is used to sample the trackball multiple times per screen.
With the house fire, I'm in the market for a new monitor - so I dropped in at my local Best Buy to get a feel for what is available. I felt like I was buying a Model T - I could have any size I wanted, as long as it was 1920x1080. I've since confirmed this via Newegg - there are a few 1920x1200 (all 24" 16:10 so I suspect they are the same panel) and a few 2560x1440 or x1600, but the majority are 1920x1080.
Now I understand the economics at work - HDTVs use the same panels and they don't n
Watched the second episode last night, which covered off the remaining 8 battles in the first round. Unfortunately, that made it a little rushed compared to the first episode which only covered 4 battles. It also meant that a bunch of the teams didn't get their 15 minutes of fame before getting knocked out. I'm now regretting deleting the first episode off my PVR, I want to go back and make notes about each of the battles. Maybe I can find it online somewhere. Highlight of this round was
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