The Raspberry Pi 5 was announced today, complete with websites and influencers giving reviews based upon pre-release hardware.
Personally I'm unimpressed.
For me the raison d'etre of the Raspberry Pi has been more about price than performance. The original Raspberry Pi was little more than an SoC devkit built around a chip they could get cheap from Broadcom. People used it because it was cheap and it had just enough processing power to make it useful for a lot of microc
The lack of interest in creating levels for Slide Tilt Roll has put a serious black cloud over my plans to release it. Seeking some inspiration, I started watching the
But after watching the first two I started to think - what was my first game? Yes, I created Skeleton / Skeleton+, but I'm talking about before that - 'way before that. I know I did a few games for the Color Computer back in the 80s - I distinctly remember a simple racing game. (Probably done in Basic - it used text mode
For those who've never heard of it, Unity is a cross-platform game creation system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)
You can use it to develop games for current systems including Windows, OSX, web, IOS and Android. Free to download & use and practically free if you ever decide to sell your creations.
Lurking on gamasutra, I've known about Unity for a while. But I'd never considered actually using it until they announced Unity 5 and I realized there was zero reason for
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://www.nintendo.com/3ds/new/
I guess Nintendo realized that most people play 3DS games with the 3D turned off, so they could sell a cheaper system without the 3D screen.
My son has a 3DS XL (currently playing through Mario & Luigi: Dream Team) and I admit we generally play with the 3D off. I'll turn it on and IMHO it does add to the games. But in most cases the "wow" doesn't offset the annoyance of having to keep everything steady and I'll turn it off again. However, I wonder
After the fire we bought an Acer Aspire One (D270) netbook to use while our laptops were being cleaned. It's biggest problem isn't the 10" 1024x600 screen or the correspondingly small keyboard but the 1GB of RAM. The Intel Atom N2600 isn't a speed demon either, but it's surprisingly adequate for basic web surfing. But once that RAM fills up the system slows to a crawl. So I'm looking at upgrading the RAM and replacing the hard drive with an SSD.
Although officially the system will only s
Stern has announced that their next pinball will be TRON Legacy. I'd really like to get one, but spending $5K (+tax) on a game is a little more than I can justify.
I think the first game I bought for my PS3 was the Orange Box - basically to get Portal (although I've played a good chunk of Half Life 2 while my wife wasn't around). So while I'm not a major fanboy, the game is definitely one of my favorites.
Anyway, I knew P2 was coming out, had watched some of the videos, but hadn't really thought about getting it until today when ars reminded me that P2 has a co-op mode. Then something clicked - P2 co-op & long weekend. What a better way to spend
Cnet published an article discussing that the Xbox 360 has reached its 5th birthday with no successor for it or its competition in sight.
The answer is simple: it's all about the money.
Microsoft and Sony initially sold their consoles at a loss to gain market share. Now they make a profit, so the more they sell now the more profit they make. Microsoft also rushed the Xbox 360 to market, which got them initial share but cost them in reliability and replacement. Microsoft and Sony have a
One of the knocks against the Propeller is it has no code protection, unlike PICs and other microcontrollers with onboard EEPROMs. And although the protection may be less than perfect, I can understand many companies are not willing to have their IP in an easily accessible state.
IMHO the way to remedy the situation is to include a small amount of onboard OTP storage for an encryption key and integrate a decryption routine into the bootloader. But for that to work someone (i.e. me) needs t
Last night I posted my sprite video driver to the Prop forum, complete with demo (a bouncing beanie which explodes into individual sprites). Screen capture in MPEG2 of first 20 seconds: ntsc240h.zip
So far, I've had two comments - one attaboy & one not-very-useful. (The latter obviously can't see the videogame potential.) But like the circus bugs in "A Bug's Life" I crave applause. I want that feedback!
Sigh... other Prop projects I'm considering:
PWM based waveform generator
A decade or so ago I bought a Hi8 camcorder. With it my wife and I have shot the usual assortment of home movies. Now my wife wants to use iMovie to change those tapes into DVDs. (Probably not a bad idea - before those tapes start dying.). These days we use the movie capability of my wife's Canon S3 instead of the camcorder. Of course, getting from point A to B isn't a simple process. The first step is to use the capture card in my old PC to make an AVI using HuffYUV lossless compression. This g
Today Apple announced the 5th generation Nano, including features not available on any other iPod models: video camera & microphone, speaker, and FM receiver. (I think the other features are 90% software, i.e. the pedometer uses the existing accelerometer.) Okay, so the iPhone has the camera and microphone, but the iPod Touch and Classic don't. (And both the Touch & iPhone have a speaker)My question is why the Nano got the goodies instead of the Touch. Maybe it's the price point. Ap
Who wouldn't want to have their own pinball machine? You too can be a pinhead, all you need is the space and the cash.
I have the space . . . in theory. I have an unfinished basement but it has accumulated a lot of stuff & junk over the past decade of residence so there's not a lot of empty floor space. Getting stuff down to the basement is also a challenge as the stairs make a 180 degree turn halfway down. But ultimately no show stoppers.
The cash is kinda sorta there too. The
I'm getting ever closer to completion of my Tempest cabinet. The rear door has been completed (although I might sand down the length, it's a might bit tight). I've been working on getting Atomic FE set up. I think the next step is getting the software on the PC and the game-specific configs done. I've soldered some speaker wire to the on/off button, now I need to find a SPMT switch to put at the other end. I also need to hack up my extension cord and connect the main on/off switch and the d
Monday my wife declared my son's piggybank to be finally full and started sorting and rolling. In all, it was over 40lbs and C$800 (those $1 & $2 coins add up quick) which will be added to his university account. But there was also over C$200 in paper money, which he has earmarked for buying a Wii. Unfortunately, the cost of the system plus one game (and tax) will cost C$400. So I guess he still has some saving to do. (Which he will probably accomplish in a year or so as he rarely spend
My Propeller video driver is almost done, but I've run into a snag. The following is a snippet from the pixel byte to long lookup routine.
SHR sprgfx1, #8 ' shift byte into position
MOV sprbyte, sprgfx1
AND sprbyte, #$0FF wz
MOVS :byte6, sprbyte ' update source pointer
MOVD :byte6, sprdata ' update destination pointer
ADD sprdata, #1
:byte6 IF_NZ MOV sprdata, sprbyte ' copy color lookup table entry to lineRAM
SHR sprgfx1, #8 wz
MOVS :byte7,
Since I can't find my Leprechaun round tuit, I've told myself I have to work on SpaceWar! 7800 some more. One of the features I really want to add to SW78 is the starfield background (Expensive Planetarium). But the tile map is much larger than the screen, thus it needs to move in some way to show the whole thing. My original idea was to make the movement based on the spaceships wrapping around; they'd kinda drag the starfield with them. The disadvantage with this idea is there are two ships
Minor update from yesterday. The leprechauns now try to go towards the player when they stop before they go into hunt mode. (Which should help vdub_bobby's switchback level.) They also should drop off the ends of ropes when stopped.
I also flip-flopped on the drop-off detection, though I'm not certain whether I like it. The Leprechauns now turn around and go into hunt mode when the player is above them and they encounter a drop-off. Unfortunately, with my built-in level this causes them
Hopefully this will be the last update to the enemy AI routines. I would appreciate if the various level creators can update their levels to the latest code (using the Leprechaun Level Editor, v20061101) and see how well things work. For the attached WIP the leprechauns eventually find the player at the starting position, something I was having great difficulty accomplishing with drop off detection.
The Leprechaun (and player) color indicates the direction their joystick is pointing:
g
Another rental. It will be interesting to see how Wii impacts GCN title availability and pricing.
Anyway, Wario Ware is billed as another party game title (like the Mario Party series). Except it's stuffed full of “micro-games” and the multi-player game has no inter-player interaction.
So what about these microgames? Although I had fun at first, they quickly lost their charm. The problem is each microgame lasts less than in a minute. In that minute you have to figure out the objective
I shoulda posted here earlier (since the first episode was shown this past weekend) but it's never too late to get started.
Anyway, if anyone is into anime / cartoons / animation then you really should watch Skyland (Weekends @ 7:30 on Teletoon in Canada, also on one of the Nick stations, and probably also some over in Europe). The quality of the animation (particularly the backgrounds) is equivalent to the big screen anime of Studio Ghibli (Howls Moving Castle; Spirited Away) or Akira. No
Leprechaun has gotten stalled unfortunately, but I came up with an idea which I'd like some comments on.One suggestion was to speed up the game. In the current WIP the player moves 1 pixel every 6 frames, while the enemies use fractional positioning to move at a slower rate. My initial idea was to change the player to use fractional positioning to move faster, but then change the enemies to 1 pixel every 6 frames (i.e. same as the current player).Anyway, it occurred to me that an interesting o
Yes, the WIP is almost done. I just need to add in the new digging sprites (and redo the old ones which I did by hand).Unfortunately, I'm going to have to find someplace to squeeze them in. I had this great idea about how to squeeze in the REFPn bit, but it didn't pan out. At one point I noticed that HMPn only uses the top 4 bits while REFPn uses bit 3. Ah-ha! I thought. If I multiply XPOS by two, change the SBC #15 in the repositioning routine to SBC #30, and double the HPOS table, I can m
I am slowly tracking down the bugs in Leprechaun, primarily using the Stella debugger, with some z26 tracing.Anyway, just for laughs, I've found the following glitches so far:- used a BCS instead of a BNE which caused the player to climb off the top of the screen- forgot that the sprite positions are already shifted 2 pixels by the positioning routine, removed the redundant shift. (Although my first attempt to do so caused more problems because I over-optimized.)- logic glitch in translating th
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