Speaking of a Blast to the Past, Here’s an openGL Tron Game I wrote as an Undergrad
I just unearthed all of my homework from my CS courses from my undergraduate degree (1999-2003). While assembling the retrospective gif for the previous post, I recalled I had a web page on my school's csserver back as an undergraduate. Google confirmed this, but more amazingly it was still serving my hand-written redirect page. My amazement turned to horror as I realized I had served many a redhat ISO internally, and they were probably still lingering on there. A quick ssh later, and I'm back in the csserver of my youth. The account was never shut down, and the redhat ISOs were still there. I made a quick copy of all the rest of the data, deleted the data from the account, and logged out. I then realized what I had actually unearthed, a perfectly preserved history of each assignment I had ever completed for every CS class I had as an undergrad (dozens). Not only that, i had written some simple openGL games for the csserver. Sitting in the top level of a forgotten web directory was a compiled windows executable for a shitty little Tron openGL game you can download here.
Quick Update – The Retrode Works with Android
I was just messing around with an old eee PC, seeing what it could do. First I installed Android 4.0 ICS. It worked fairly well, though the lack of sound on my particular model meant it wasn't a keeper. Still, when I plugged in the Retrode it was immediately recognized and I could play the game boy emulator on the market with the directional pad on my SNES controller. Fun!
Using an Original SNES Controller and Cartridge with your PC, PS3, or Dockstar (Retrode Pre-Order glory)
I've mentioned the Retrode before, and if you don't know it's a terrific device by Matthias Hullin which allows you to use your original Super Nintendo and Genesis controllers with anything USB. I set out to use an original SNES controller and original cartridge to play Mario Kart. I ended up doing just that on a couple of interesting platforms, and I'm terrifically pleased with the finished product. Read on for more photos, videos of the PS3 and Retrode working together, and good times.
Pro Tip – Add your Wii Games To Your Steam List
If you're like me, you ditched your Wii in favor of a pure emulation solution once you realized you could play your legally purchased disks in full 1080p emulated using the Dolphin Wii/GameCube emulator. It's fast as crap, improves the graphics, and is free. Plus the ability to save my disks as .ISO files and play them at my leisure is a time saver. One thing that I've gotten used to on the PC is playing PC games from Steam, and I'm looking forward to their new 10 foot living room view. So I decided to put them together. Turns out it's not that hard. Read on for the mini-tutorial.
Dockstar Stereo + Wii Frontend
Chris Irwin alerted me in a previous article about MPD, the music playing daemon. While I was planning on installing this as both a client and a server on the dockstar stereo, It turns out there's a MPD frontend for the Wii. I hadn't been giving my Wii very much love lately, being so active in the PS3 scene. On a whim I picked up a little tv to use as a monitor for the Dockstar stereo, and I hooked the Wii up to it to see how things were going in the Wii homebrew community. I was BLOWN away. Not only has the wii media center grown tremendously, (it streams from samba shares), all the emulators have been updated (ps1 games from samba shares!), and there's a tremendously dynamic game modification community (check out smashmods for some of the coolest in-ram game modification you will EVER see). The wii VNC client works quite well as a head unit for the dockstar stereo, but it's got a native MPD frontend that I thought would be fun to get running. Read on for the setup of MPD on the Dockstar Stereo (or any embedded arm linux).
No Solder, No Tools, No Trouble USB Wii Sensor Bar Conversion
Like many of my readers, I'm excited about the prospect of playing New Super Mario Brothers in 1080p with 16xAF and 8x AA and 3x the internal graphical resolution. Of course I'm not talking about the recently announced Wii 2, but the Dolphin emulator, which is currently running New Super Mario at a crisp 60fps with the above settings on my laptop. The wiimote and accessories connect fine via internal bluetooth, but what about the sensor bar? Turns out if you've bought yours recently you may not need anything other than a pair of scissors to convert yours to USB.
Read on to find out how!
XBSLink on (ARM) Linux – Get Your PS3 Back Online Using Only 4 Watts
As someone who hacks up every console he's ever gotten, my PS3 has been rocking a Linux enabled CFW for some time now (remember that tutorial I did way back on turning your Linux PS3 into a cross-compilation powerhouse?). As such, I've gotten the banhammer from Sony PSN networks, and if I want to play some multiplayer games with my PS3, I'm out of luck except for LAN play. This is fine, as there's always tunneling applications such as Xlink Kai, or so I thought. It's been quite a while since I last looked into XLink Kai. This article was originally going to be titled "Xlink Kai Arm Port", however the XLink Kai developers have decided to close source their project. That's their prerogative and if they feel it contributes to the quality of their project it's within their purveyance to do so. That said, it just doesn't jive with me. One can argue the effectiveness of closed source solutions but at the end of the day Xlink Kai would have had a fully working ARM port working on all the billions of Arm devices today if they had left their source open, because I would have ported it this weekend.
Anyway, things being what they are I decided to get their main competitor (XBSLink) running on the ARM platform. Some of the ps3 hacker blogs have been talking about XBSLink lately, and I thought it'd be an optimal application for a little ARM box (a pogoplog perhaps). This will allow you to run the XBSLink daemon on your ARM based Linux box (hopefully pulling 4 watts or less like mine is) and save you the hassle of running a full 400 watt multi core many gigahertz PC for a frikkin port forwarding application. Read on for the setup tutorial. I had gone into this article prepared to walk you through a full compilation and porting tutorial, but it turns out it's not necessary. Read on for the full guide!
