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
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
Apparently the big game for early teens in Minecraft - at least according to my 13 year old son. Unfortunately, he hasn't been able to partake in the game himself as we still haven't replaced the home computer (when will the Mac mini be upgraded to Haswell Apple, when?), nor can it be installed (even the "classic" version) on his Chromebook. But now the Xbox360 port has been ported to the PS3 - so I downloaded it as an early Christmas present.
We originally tried to play the demo (which se
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
Assuming MS can bring down the price of the Xbox One to match the PS4 (likely by not including the Kinect as dropping the HMDI IN port & functionality would require new hardware - maybe for the slim version), gamers will be picking consoles this November/December based on brand loyalty and exclusive launch titles. (I expect there will be very little difference between consoles for non-exclusive titles.)
the Xbox One has the following exclusive games confirmed for 2013:
Dead Rising 3
It's too bad that CableCard never replaced set top boxes. I just hung a TV on the wall (32" which I can see while I do dishes) and now I need to figure out how to mount the cableco STB if I want to watch something more than basic cable.
Yesterday I bought an LG 55LM6400 (pick it up Tuesday) for C$1300. It's a 55" passive 3D HDTV. Again I declined the extended warranty - hopefully I won't have reason to second-guess that decision again. My buying decision started with passive 3D (which also implies LCD - but I would have gone with LCD over PWM flicker plasma anyway) as the glasses are cheaper, don't require batteries & give a more stable image to boot. Yes, there is some loss of vertical resolution, but I read some semi-
My Tempest MAME cabinet is coming along well. After some initial learning curve frustration, I now have 3D Arcade configured as a front end. It displays the games as 3D cabinets in a spinable cylinder. It still needs some tweaks and some additional setup, but it's now close enough to be usable. The main task is now going through all of the games and making sure they work and making any necessary configuration tweaks. In doing so, I've run into a problem...
MAME is, first and foremost, a
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
In addition to the 2600 & 7800, I have the desire to program the Vectrex. I grew up in the golden age of video games and vector games were part of the magic. The Vectrex also uses a 6809 - the processor I first programming in ASM.
In brief, the way the Vectrex draws vectors is:
1. Set the Y velocity
2. Set the X velocity
3. Turn on the beam
4. Turn on the integrators which change the X/Y velocity into X/Y position
5. Wait for timer to expire
6. Turn the integrators & beam off
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
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.
Leprechaun Level Editor, see Topic in Homebrews for more info.
I'm seriously psyched about this. I was having soooo much trouble trying to get the Javascript to initialize (not really knowing anything about JS). In comparison the PHP was simple (although I have a habit of forgetting the semicolons).
Now I just need to get grinding on handling the end of level / end of game & load next level items.
Well, I just bought two ATI HDTV Wonders on eBay, so I guess it's gone beyond plotting.
I've read as much as I can without taking the plunge. In theory it should be fairly simple.
1. Acquire PC to use as a back-end server. This server contains the capture cards and the hard drives to store the recordings. Since I'm dealing with ATSC the CPU specs don't matter.
2. Acquire compatible capture card(s). Sure, there may be cheaper cards out there which you might be able to get working, but i
I've enhanced my workflow, so I'll share it for others who may want to do something similar.Step 1 - using a simple video capture program and an analog capture card, I capture the video at 720x480 (YUV2 compressed with HuffYUV), and 48KHz 16bit audio to NTFS formated disk.Step 2 - use AVCutty to detect scene changes. I created a custom scene index to simplify the next step.Step 3 - compress the scenes to DV format using ffmpeg -ss hh:mm:ss.00 -t hh:mm:ss.00 -i capture.avi -target ntsc-dv "clip-
So I posted my OnePinTVText driver. That's right, a text display on a TV using only 1 pin. Actually, there's no reason it can't do any other monochrome display with an 8x8 font. Anyone for a nice game of chess? Not much feedback yet. Sniff. I'd like to try to get it to work with the internal RC ~12MHz clock, but my first try didn't work. So I'll put that idea on the back burner for the moment.
My next project is to add SD support to my Z-machine interpretter so it can play the Infocom
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
After a long hiatus, I'm tackling my Propeller video driver. I think I figured out why my previous attempts didn't work. First, there were some technical issues with synchronization of the cogs which I now think I understand. (Plus Chip, the head honcho, has given the step-by-step instructions on what needs to be done.) But the bigger problem is I tried to do everything at once. I was trying to achieve too many new ideas at the same time. So when it didn't work, I didn't have
So this
I love eBay. Where else can you easily buy something like a 25' headphone extension cord dirt cheap? Yeah, there might be a local supplier but I have no idea how to find them. And places like Radio Shack will charge you the item's weight in gold. It's the long tail idea.
And why did I want a 25' headphone extension cord? To connect my old TiVo on the first floor to a computer in the basement via it's serial port to retrieve guide data. So now I can use the TiVo's far superior search &a
I played Wolf3D when it first came out. I played DOOM and DOOM II when they first came out. But when Quake came out my home PC no longer had the necessary horsepower. Thus I was pushed off the FPS bandwagon (except for Goldeneye). I also no longer had the time and desire to dedicate to playing games. And online has little appeal to me. But then I saw Half Life athology in the bargain bin at the grocery store. I resisted for a long while, but I finally couldn't say no to $10. At one time I played
One of the things I did while visiting my in-laws was to do some cleanup of their computer. In spite of having the McAfee suite, they'd managed to pick up a bunch of malware. I suspect it started with some kind of "free" download which installed a toolbar or taskbar tool, which then installed something else . . . and next thing you know they're getting random pop-ups and error messages.
Anyway, I'm wondering if anyone has ever found a sensible guide to safe computing? Not just "install an
Have you ever played a game and wondered whether you bought the same game as reviewers? Super Monkey Ball 2 is like that for me.
Another one of my cheap bastard eBay purchases. I don't have Super Monkey Ball 1 yet, so I can't compare the two. But I'm glad I only paid $10 for it.
Maybe it's because I'm playing the single player story mode instead of the multiplayer games. Or maybe the reviewers only played the first ten maps and cribbed the rest from Super Monkey Ball 1. Who knows?
Well, I haven't touched Leprechaun in over a month. I thought I might find the time over the holidays, but the drive simply wasn't there. Sigh
Big news on the home front is my mother in law is in town 'cause my wife had jaw surgery to fix her overbite. She's not wired shut, but she is swollen and on a liquid diet. I don't think either of us were prepared for the full impact. Ah, well; it's a temporary thing.
My son is having fun playing New Super Mario Bros on his DS, although I thi
"The Death of PC Gaming"
Attention all PC gamers, start saving your pennies now.
Based on the above article, it sounds like Microsoft might manage to kill PC gaming. In brief:
1. DX10 will require a DX10 capable graphics card and Vista
2. Indications are DX10 graphics cards will have substantial power & cooling requirements, potentially requiring a bigger power supply
3. Vista will definitely require more RAM than XP, and will probably require more CPU
4. Indications also are
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord