Playpower

went to makezine.com as usual and found this cool post about the playpower, an open source"$10" computer based on the 6502 and famicon...basically a new famibasic computer (which was never released in the us). pretty interesting and something i could actually afford right now. on the playpower site theres tons of links to tutorials on programming (basic, c, asml), making chiptunes, and interactive design, as well as a blog and wiki. it can also be purchased in the maker shed at makezine.com ...however it costs about 50 bux there. it would have been ever more awesome had it actually costed $10 for us but part of the markup goes back into supporting playpower which then supports those in developing countries. also the list of schools that help work on this project is pretty interesting M.I.T is one in the us and others in India and China i believe. The "Nintendo AVS" link is a link to early drawings and info on what the NES was originally going to be released as ...a computer that hooked up to your tv and also played games and music. links below






Playpower , playpower brief , Nintendo avs , family basic , makezine article , maker shed

enought recurrsion to make rms proud!!!!

so..i just got back in from the library as usual. But this time i wasn't taking out books. a few weeks ago the librarians asked me to come in and do something about gaming/design etc, as part of "teen tech week". so i worked with about 12 or so kids/young adults/young people , and taught them a bit about game maker, a program to help people publish games or hmm make software it doesn't have to be a game at all. It turned out good , i had to stop them from calling me "mr" cause it just felt weird. for my first time "teaching" things went good too i taught them some stuff they taught me some stuff. and the librarian with whom i worked with talked with me about making this a regular thing so when we work it out we will have a small game dev group. funny cause lol i did not go in with the intensions of anything this size happenening ...very surprising in a good way. there were photos take and i guess when i get them i'll put them up.

and for the second thing. for one day i actually broke out of night mode and was up like a regular person at 7/8 am. so i'v gotten mac fever lately..and i recalled seeing a site about making a "mac on a stick". which is a emulator that runs off a usb thumbdrive that emulates early mac os........ahhh high school memories of using mac se's. i tried it out and it's pretty cool, so now i have a mac emulating a mac that emulates a mac(6502) and a pdp 8. links below if anyone wants to try it out.



mac on a stick , mac se , mac on a stick(better for windows) , gamemaker , welcome to macintosh

welcome to macintosh(documentary) , apple fritter , pirates of silicon valley

ASM

                                                 6502 chip


I've been cleaning out my closet the last few days and found interesting stuff. Most of all , i found an old article i printed out in 2001 titled "how to be a game designer"  and old japanses lessons from an old site "the planet namek"/"planet namek", from when i was a Dragonball Z lover..still am just not as much. I thought it was strange because these are things i've returned to doing learning about intensively. I would think "what took me so long" but i've been exploring and doing many other things since then.

Now since i've been doing tons of programming and looking for a machine to dev on or for. I've been looking and looking. along the way i rediscovered the NEC Turbografx 16/Pc-Engine (in japan). It's such a neat machine and has tons of cool games, and good aesthetics and made me wonder why doesnt' any developer make games like these anymore? They are simple yet really fun(i guess thats another post). So i've been doing tons of research on the homebrew scenes and found some cool/intersting things about this machine. it used the 6502 cpu which was also in the NES,SNES,Atari 8-bit computers, Apple II, and Commodore 64. And this chip can be programmed using it's assembly language. I joined some forums and found lots of helpful info. I definately dont' think i'll be able to match the quality of any of the real games, i'm looking to do something simple and see how it goes from there.

It looks like i'll be giving 6502 assembly a shot and see what i come up with. This is one machine that i could easily get my hands on it's cheaper than the meggy jr and the bugbase(not that i've stopped working on them). For now i'd have to do more with emulation since i can't really afford to pour all my money into it right now...i'm trying to save for school fees for when/if i get into grad school (fingers crossed). Also i'm working on making a shooting watch with python when i get a working version i will post it here for anybody to use/learn from. Links and Links and Links galore below!!!

                                 

                    

                                                                                      

note* images : Turbografx 16, Pc-Engine,  "Hucards/Turbochips , the unique cartridges/rom chips for the machine", had problems getting things aligned

6502 , Turbo/Pc-Engine , PCenginefx(good site,commercials,forum info) 

related but not related:

retro game ads (fun, full of nostalgia)

SATSUI NO HADOU!!!!!!

...somewhat drifting further from the real purpose of this blog. I just came from participating in a tournament to promote the realease of Street Fighter IV. It was a great time...even though i lost. It really cool to have about 40 other all excited over the same thing. Since i lost ..i guess i have to start "training" again for the next one in march, this one isn't official or anything. Despite losing it was still fun.

 Shoryuken, National tournament

bored, so took apart an ipod

i was just bored one day so i decided to try to save this old ipod shuffle, there was a plug from the charging dock broken off inside. it was a pain, and i felt there were too many screws could have easily been held together by 2 well placed ones. But i did get a cool new tool a 4 in 1 screwdriver pen and yes that is a popsicle stick ( won't short anything out, cause its wood). I got the plug out, the jack didn't have any way to pull it out so i had to use the smallest screwdriver i could find and poke a small hole through the other end. The plug shot clear across the room, plugged some headphones in after putting it back together, but nothing..i guess the battery lost it's charge and i have no base so i can't really use it . But it was fun taking it apart.

The tiny tiny source of the problem.


didn't get it from here but heres the tool really cheap for anyone ever reads this:

General 4 in 1 , cool cheap precision set

quasi new pc

A few days ago i was bored, i got an old pc from the basement and tried to fix it up. I ran into so many problems, it had windows 2k as the os as well as tons of viruses. I couldn't even get online to dld any fixes and it didn't even have msconfig...smh. Then i remembered i had this around.



A copy of ubuntu a distro of linux that i got for free a while ago. The install was easy and i think it works on the machine way better than windows did. Took me 2 days to download updates and some ide's to code with. So i ended up with a like new pc with state of the art zip and floppy drives. Now i can program in peace!!!!!!!!!




more info:
ubuntu site, download other versions of linux

ides:
netbeans, Dragonfly

open source greatness

Meggy jr RGB




BugBase



just two things i thought were really cool and lol if theres ever and end to this job search i'll def think about buying the hardware. But for now i'm working on my coding skills, and job hunting.