This is something I've wanted to do for years, and I finally got around to it.
We all know a million is a large number, but exactly how large? Watch my new video and see for yourself:
http://youtu.be/h_wNu-T-K80
This was a fun and simple project. It was pretty easy to build the cylinder and attach the frames. The most challenging part was how to spin it. That was solved by mounting it on an old disassembled hard disk. (It's spun by hand.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBWqsJzgqho
The frames are old photos taken by Eadweard Muybridge, who is well known in the history of animation.
This could be a fun project for kids. My suggestion is to draw or print frames with brighter colors. The grays i
I use Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and don't usually get involved in brand rivalries, but this iTunes search for the PCWorld podcast was pretty funny. Check it out.
This search was made on October 1, 2011. I was originally planning to post the screenshot the following weekend, but then we lost Steve Jobs.
North America has not had a solar eclipse in a long time. On Sunday, most of the continent will see a partial eclipse, and a lucky few will be able to view an annular eclipse. As you have probably heard, an annular eclipse happens when the moon blocks the center of the sun, creating a ring of sunlight.
Those of us in Sacramento are in a pretty good location, about 20 miles south of the predicted annular eclipse zone. I'm guessing that we will nearly see a full ring.
I have built a s
We all continue to speculate whether we will have hoverboards by 2015, but if you go back to the first movie, Doc Brown was originally planning to go 25 years into the future before the Libyans showed up. He always dreamed of seeing the future looking beyond his years, seeing the progress of mankind.
Of course 1985 + 25 = 2010.
So suppose it were two years ago, and Doc asks you to show him around and explain how things have changed since 1985. What do you tell him? For example:
Pretty
I am a long time Windows user who just set up a new computer on Saturday, a Mac Mini running on OS X Leopard. I didn't get the Mac to replace my PC, and I plan to use both for a long time to come. In fact, they share the same keyboard, monitor, and mouse. I haven't even used it for 12 hours yet, so here are my first impressions.
Pros:
Overall easy to navigate operating system.
Calculator with programmer mode.
Graphing calculator!
Built-in dictionary. What took so long?
Weather panel.
It has been over a year since I've posted anything to my blog. Unfortunately I do not have much time for homebrewing these days, but I still hope someday to get back to some of my unfinished projects.
A while ago, I took on the challenge of making a chess kernel without flickering or Venetian blinds. After many aggravating attempts, I finally got it with some convoluted code. I know a chess homebrew is low priority compared to the other projects I've started, but I've been thinking about how
If you haven't seen it in the homebrew forum yet, I have posted a demo of a well-known Russian block game. The kernel manages 10 independently colored blocks at 8 pixels wide. (Well, 9 pixels for the far right one.)
Although there are only 4 COLUxx registers in the TIA, VBLANK offers an often overlooked 5th color (always black).
There are four colors available for the first 4 cells: background, playfield, player 0, and player 1. There are also three registers that can be pre-loaded with
I've been busy making an applet of Catacombs of Mu. Since it's an original game, I thought it would be a good idea to try out the gameplay before doing any 6502 coding.
I'm aware that there are bugs, and am not looking for bug reports at this time. Also, I probably will tweak the gameplay. I just wanted to show you what I've been working on:
http://gaia.ecs.csus.edu/~matleyz/mu/mu.html
p.s. The game flickers more on some systems than others. Now I understand why most Java applet game
OK, I changed the colours in Four-Play for those of you who live across the Atlantic, (or the Pacific, for you Aussies and Kiwis.)
The colours look good in z26 to me. Anyone care to try on hardware?
Today I built a bike light out of a prototype board, a 9V battery connector, a resistor, and an LED. It won't win any beauty contests, but it works. I have new respect for the people around here would build their own hardware, because I've now dealt with wires slipping out of holes heat them, getting plastic insulation too close to the iron, cutting a wire too short, etc.
One problem I had was that the holes in the prototype board were too small to insert two wires that I wanted to connect.
If the design is really as simple as shown below, and if it could actually work, this could be a good electronics project for a beginner like myself. It seems to be just a matter of attaching wires.
If the dumper is safe, I can think of a certain undumped Charlie Brown prototype that resides here in Northern California. It was batari who first suggested the idea of using a switch to make his dumping program work safely, although what he described is a little different.
I already ha
(new binary with bug fixes and new puzzle #1)
cc2_cd_zip.zip
Overall, I thought the comments from the 2006 1K compo were fair. The addition of new puzzles should significantly improve gameplay.
Note that all puzzles can be solved from any starting square. Also, the first puzzle is just a warm up; if you keep moving, you can't lose.
If you are new to Knight Jumper, the object of the puzzle is to guide your chess knight across the board touching each square exactly once. First move
(actual screenshot)
Here's another kernel that I would have not thought possible earlier. It draws up to 17 objects that can independently be any of 5 colors. I'll give you all a chance to guess how this works before explaining it.
Here are some details. Are they useful as hints?
The ball is available as a cursor, and can be a 6th color.
Colors are very limited: the choices are $3X $7X $BX or $FX.
If the number of objects in a row is at most 11, the color choices are unrestricte
Three years ago I would not have thought this kernel was possible.
There is no game logic at this point. The program just allows three players to place their stones on the board, all using the left joystick.
Note that the cursor does not move into the top row yet. There is certainly room for improvement, but this is good enough to show how a Go-Moku kernel would work. The next steps will be to implement the top row, make the cursor more responsive to the joystick, and to put in dia
veclogo.zip
When you are finished trying out Conquest of Mars and the other MCG releases, check out the latest version of Four-Play with four difficulty levels.
Note some changes to the controls:
RESET now takes you to the title screen
FIRE does not switch sides anymore, but at the end of a game, resets the game at the current level.
To switch sides during a game, flip the LEFT DIFFICULTY switch. It's not effective during the thinking process. Again, you can use this feature to w
veclogo.zip
Here is the demo recently shown at the Midwest Gaming Classic. It includes substantial improvements over the last release:
* Title screen
* Board and marbles made taller
* All winning combinations highlighted when a player wins in more than one direction.
* Entire board blinks when game ends in a draw.
* Barndoor effect and a stable scanline count during the thinking process.
* Game responds to immediate threats and wins instantaneously.
The m
If anyone needs to reach me, please be advised that due to moving, my internet access will be less frequent than usual. Four-Play is still on schedule, and is planned for release in a few months. I'll try to synchronize the release with any events that AtariAge may attend in the summer.
Tonight I finished off the last few puzzles. The most difficult by far was #19, where I was stuck for months:
Even when you've solved all 24 puzzles in Marble Jumper it still has replay value, because you are not likely to remember all the solutions. Indeed I doubt I could complete #19 again without spending a long time.
I finally decided to wean myself off z26 logs and learn to use to the Stella debugger. It will obviously make homebrewing easier once I get used to it.
I am trying to set a break when PF1 is set to $aa. I tried the instruction below, and the program is clearly not breaking when the condition is met. Does anyone see what is wrong?
breakif { *PF1 == $aa}
pescoman_v96.zip
My Four-In-A-Row board game has been playable for some time now, so now I'm just polishing things up. Of course, this list is subject to change.
1) Stabilize scanlines per frame during thinking state.
Thanks to Fred and John for their help.
2) Title screen graphics
Big thanks to Nathan for the title artwork. You are looking at an actual screenshot above. I've managed to animate the colors in the text, a first for a 52 pixel image. There is still a little bit of wo
What a great game. It is the story of a boy who is banished by his village because he happens to grow bull-like horns. They imprison him an in an uninhabited island castle. Well, almost uninhabited. He meets a young girl with strange powers who is also a prisoner. The two work together to escape the castle, which just happens to be filled with well designed and challenging puzzles.The game's style is unusual for a video game, with a minimal use of color and music. It will not be to everyone's ta
krokodile_commander.zip(52 and 48 pixel Pac-Man logos by DEBRO)I have attached a tool that converts a 52-pixel wide BMP file to assembly code that can be plugged into a kernel. The BMP file should be set to 256 colors, but the program only reads it as monochrome. To set the colors for each line, you have to manually change the data in the C code. If you don't have a compiler, you can edit the assembly code too.You will see from the code that it uses a lot of ROM. The routine takes 56 bytes per l
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