Not Quite a Phoenix : Raising my MAME Machine From the Ashes.
I've been meaning to sit down and write this for some time now, but have always managed to come up with some sort of convenient excuse not to. Well now, coffee in hand, I'm going to make this happen.
I built a Mame arcade machine back in the summer of 2003 with my father. It was a ton of fun and I at least learned about the large whole of my knowledge and experience involving woodworking. However me being a student at the time, and now a graduate (arcade machines, while awesome, don't travel well or fit within a student's nomadic lifestyle), and my own parents having moved twice in that time, means that this little arcade machine has traveled many miles, and we unfortunately didn't design some aspects of the machine to handle the stresses of the average move.
About the third move was when things started to go south. This move was done by “professional” movers, and apparently the entire cabinet was dropped or something. The monitor yoke had fallen off the back of the monitor tube and smashed into the PC motherboard at the bottom of the cabinet. It looked worse than it actually was, and it didn't take too long to get it running again. Lucky for me there.
The next move happened while I was busy away at college, no idea what happened there, but I came home after college and the machine wouldn't boot up at all. After a few diagnostics, I decided that well, the parts were ancient when I built it, they must have finally given up the ghost, so I chucked the motherboard in the bin, and went about scrounging some new parts. This was the first step in legacy hell.
Post-process glow in a GLSL shader.
As the render monkey for my final project team, I've been doing extensive research as to some interesting techniques with which to make our game pretty. I'm pretty proud of the effect I just finished, so I figured I'd share it with you.
This is the model for our scout unit, with his post-process glow effect turned on:
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- The base scout, lit, but no texture.
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- Lit, now with one texture for the base, and another marking the areas that glow.
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- Now the normal mapping is applied, to bring out the relief.
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- Finally, the post-process glow effect, to really make him look lit up.
Very Tron, eh? Well that's where this sort of effect came from, the Gamasutra article about the Real-Time glow effects used in Tron 2.0. The Specifics as to how this effect was constructed is an article for another time, as it is pretty complex, and I want some time to refine the effect.
Piracy on the Nintendo DS
As sort of a counterpoint to Sailing the seven seas of Nintendo DS piracy, I'd like to write about my pesonal experiences about the subject. I'm what you might call a 'budget gamer', I avoid paying full price for my games whenever possible. There was a point in time when I could burn though all of my disposable income on things like games, but not so these days; now I haunt pre-owned games, and look forwared to the weekend deals through steam and similar to satisfy my gaming addiction.
I've mention my M3 card for my Nintendo DS before. While I do use it to play homebrew software, such as Colors! and a fantastic NES and Genesis emulator, I make no attempts to sugar-coat the fact that I originally bought the thing to pirate games. The story doesn't end therem however, the ability to try any DS game out of the whole library has led to me buying games I wouldn't normally buy, such as:
Blatant Misuse of Technology
Mega Man 9 is a fantastic retro trip, and it will totally kick your ass. Not actually a NES game, but a custom engine designed to be as close as possible (though presumable not being as difficult to develop for). This was the first game to be played on my new PS3. Although I'm not entirely sure what was the greater abuse, the fact that I used the PS3 for this, or the fact that MM9 apparently outputs its sound in 5.1 surround. Hearing NES-style chiptunes in surround sound is a little eerie, to say the least.
As for the game itself, awesome, but very, very HARD.
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Recent Posts
- I’m backing it, you should too!
- Not Quite a Phoenix : Raising my MAME Machine From the Ashes.
- The boy with a screw in his bellybutton.
- DIY Steam Cloud
- Astronomical.
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