The other day my wife casually said "my DS". Now, I have to admit that we may have discussed that my son's Nintendo DS was hers since he now has a 3DS, but I hadn't really considered it. The problem is my wife's interest in games doesn't match mine or my son's. And although she has more free time to play, her interest in a particular game can disappear quite quickly. In other words, she's the typical Facebook gamer.
So how to possibly satisfy her needs? Hmm.... I've always wanted a flas
A couple of years ago my wife and I played an MMO called Glitch. IMHO Glitch was doomed from the start because it only charged real money for vanity items and it wasn't social enough or fun enough to play indefinitely. However, the stylized artwork was was very well done and one of the more enjoyable parts of the game.
When I first saw screenshots of "Road Not Taken" on gamasutra, I was struck by how much the characters reminded me of Glitch. Not surprising since the same artist, Brent Ko
In the comments for http://atariage.com/forums/blog/148/entry-13844-blast-off/there was some discussion on whether the TIA could be used to generate speech. Previously I'd done some programming which tried to brute-force fit the TIA waveforms to music. The results were less than impressive, but speech might be simple enough to achieve better results. The waveforms were based on what I'd learned about the TIA Audio Noise Generator circuit, and documented in several blog posts (sorry about th
Additionally, creator Markus "Notch" Persson, partner Jakob Porser and CEO Carl Manneh will also be leaving Mojang. Even before the sale Markus has tried to move away from Minecraft, but felt that selling out was they only way to continue to be himself.
I do wonder how MS plans on recovering it's 2.5 billion dollar investment. (Especially since MS believes it will happen before June 2015!)
While on a 2 week vacation to watch the Daytona 500 (my wife is the NASCAR fan), I picked up the Chumby powered Insignia Infocast (in spite of none of the Best Buy drones knowing what one was). Now that I have it, I'm wondering what I'm going to use it for.
It certainly will function as an 8" 800x600 digital picture frame, just stick in an SD card. Ideally I'd like to pull stuff from iPhoto or Picassa (since that's where I store photos now). It can also play back videos, although the chal
Last night I told myself to stop playing Minecraft and get back to work on my iOS game. At least start to put together the level editor. Once I have something partially working I'm much more likely to spend time working on it. But XCode had other ideas as it had updated. So when I opened the project, it asked me (twice) whether I wanted to convert it to the current version of Swift. I said no, but then it said it wouldn't be able to compile it. That wasn't a good option either. So I made
Okay, I've figured out how the clock for the 4 stage shifter is done and gone back through and reworked all of the equations now that I'm a little more used to keeping track of whether I'm changing a NOR to an OR or an AND (depending on whether I want the output or the inputs inverted). This isn't to say I couldn't get it wrong, just less chance.Q1-5 is the 5 stage shift registerQ6-9 is the 4 stage shift register
AUDC Q1in0000 1xx00 (Q5 XOR Q9) + !Q1*!Q2*!Q3*!Q4*!Q5*!Q6*!Q7*!Q8*!Q9yyxx (Q5 XOR
Back in August we had a house fire which destroyed much of the contents by heat & smoke, including my Wii & PS3. Insurance will replace both, but I'm debating whether I should replace the Wii with a Wii U or not.
Actually, the first question is whether to replace them at all. I mean, my free time is fairly limited, and we try to limit my son's game playing time. So why drop $$ on a console which doesn't get used?
The PS3 will get replaced because it's a decent Blu-Ray player (
Many moons ago I bought Civilization Revolution for the PS3 and have been playing it quite a bit ever since. But always single player, i.e. versus the AI. I've gotten fairly good, where I win the majority of the time against the highest difficulty level. But I've avoided the online multiplayer for a couple of reasons - can't save (so have to dedicate time), and there are quite a few very good players out there.
Well, this weekend I played my first online game and got spanked. Yes, at the
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
There's a free Angry Birds beta available via the Chrome App Store. I've played through the first 21 screens and I can't understand why it's so popular.
This isn't to say that I don't enjoy it. I certainly had fun with this physics/puzzle game. But I also found the gameplay somewhat frustrating, and my tolerance and patience for failure is reasonably high. Thus, I imagine that most people would find the game very frustrating (confirmed by my wife), thus I am puzzled by why it's popular.
In summary, the demo is better than the game.
Many moons ago I downloaded the free demo for my PS3. I played through that demo numerous times, searching for secrets, discovering combos, and finding new ways to wipe out hapless stormtroopers and rebel scum in efforts to achieve the frenzy bonus. So when I saw a kid selling it at a garage sale, I scooped it up (along with Prince of Persia). Now that I'm playing the actual game, I'm pining for the demo.
The one thing which is keeping me
I have been making updates to my Panoramic Photo Gallery: https://sites.google.com/site/ericballpanorama/ both adding newly stitched panoramas and revising older ones adding metadata and a watermark. Now I've reworked my main page to list the panoramas by location rather than in a simple ToC. At the bottom I've linked one of the panoramas, but what I'd really like to do is make that a slide show or a random panorama. With a normal site this would all be done in Javascript, but as this is Goog
I'm nearly done a DLI version of my paddle proof of concept & trackball proof of concept. (Just need to fix an error in my ROM to RAM copy routine, I used the wrong label.) I'll put them up tonight. Hmm... just to complete the set I should do one for the driving controller too.In non-7800 geek news I made a bezel for my Tempest cab and put the glass back in. It looks really, really nice. Unfortunately, the next to-do is a biggie - getting the software set up on the PC so it's functional
Zork! HitchHikers! Ahh, the memories of glowing green text and the frustration a text adventure can bring.
Interestingly, Infocom had the forsight to create their games as a program for a virtual computer. That way they didn't have to create separate versions of each for each home computer. The same game file could run on multiple home computers using the existing interpretters. And when a new home computer reached the market, the whole library of games would be available by just writing
I now have MAME (2003 - 0.78) up and running, woot! I've loaded up "the best of" from pre-1986, now I need to figure out how to set the controls beyond the defaults. This also means I can play the originals rather than the console ports. I'm also working on getting Colecovision running. I've created a script which creates a playlist from a directory of zip'd ROMs, as Lakka doesn't seem to auto recognize them. Unfortunately, the CV emulator is also the MSX emulator, so I need to figure out
Although I keep trying to limit the number of projects I'm working on at one time, I keep adding new ones.My latest is TiVo. I realized that my wife has several shows that she enjoys watching which often get taped & watched later due to RL scheduling conflicts. Hmm... we keep using the same tape over & over for time-shifting. Sounds like TiVo would be a good fit and an excellent birthday present. (October)Except for one snag. TiVo doesn't offer listings outside of the US & UK.
Second try at making the VCS play 2 Unlimited's "Get Ready For This" (or at least 30 seconds of it).
Differences:
1. First 10 seconds are skipped, which means it starts with the better sounding chords.
2. Only uses AUDC 4, 6 & 12 (square waves)
Notes: it sounds better on a VCS than an emulator (although the emulator does the score color, while my 7800 doesn't, weird); not compatible with an unmodified SuperCharger.
Method behind the madness:
1. Song ripped from CD to WAV, th
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slide-tilt-roll/id1366633420?mt=8 I took a day off so I could finally put on my "round-tuit" and get my iOS game into the App Store.
100% free to play. No in-app purchases. No subscriptions. No advertising. WiFi not required.
30 levels to complete (so far)
Built-in level creator with the option to submit levels for inclusion in future updates.
Requres iOS 9 or better, compatible with all devices
For those interested in Apple ][ copy protection (and cracking of it) I have found two troves of information. First is the 4am Apple ][ Library at https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am Attached to each archive is a text file where 4am describes his cracking process. In most cases he simply follows the boot process, analyzes the often obfuscated code to figure out how to capture the next step in the process, then determines the minimum change required to allow the disk to be easily
I'm back to working on my iOS game "Slide Tilt Roll" in preparation to using it for a presentation to some computer students at my son's high school.
I updated the MacBook to High Sierra, updated to XCode 9, installed XCode 8 to upgrade the code base from Swift 2.2 to Swift 3.0, then used XCode 9 to bring it up to Swift 4.0. That worked for 90% of the code, then I needed to go through and manually fix a few errors and warnings (mostly confined to sqlite and CGPath functions).
I've als
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
Both potatohead and I agree that GeoHot's exploit represented a potential piracy risk to Sony. The question I have is whether Sony could have done something other than disable OtherOS in response.
Well, they could have ignored it. The attack required a hardware mod and a little bit of luck to break out of the Hypervisor walled garden. But even after that was accomplished getting to piracy (either game or media) may not have been possible, at least in the short term. Unfortunately, histor
My arm is still tingling. I was connecting up the receiver/amplifier in my Tempest cabinet when my hand brushed the dangling monitor on/off switch. Silly me I had left the monitor plugged in. Well, it turns out that switch is line AC, not a sense DC. Now "120" AC isn't as bad as the 240 they use elsewhere (which can kill), but it'll still make you yell and jump.Current beauty shot of my Tempest MAME cabinet. Just added the speaker marquee this weekend.Still to do:1 - coin door: need a lock,
For Christmas I got Skyward Sword. Unfortunately, my wife didn't get my email about the game+controller bundle, so I had to pick up a Motion Pus controller before I could play it.
I've played about 4 hours so far, so consider this a very early review.
I will say there's been an awful lot of dialog in the game so far, on top of the intro backstory movie. I just hope they do something with Groose, or that was a whole whack of dialog which wasn't that necessary.
The game - it's Zelda
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