Who said we can just wire the TV?? @@

Yeah.. it didn't work.. I was right... the frequency is different between computer monitor and the arcade TV, first, is the frequency, second, the resolutions... so.. after spending hours of wiring @@ , now, i'm back to the old issue again. I think I prefer to use an monitor... all I need to do is figure how to mount it... We finally took the arcade apart... I'm more like a do-it person when there are not risk to take things apart. And oh.. yeah.. 5 mins works saved our few hours research, nice!


And so far, we've got 6 games for sure. I hope I can find more in the future.

Pinball: excellent
NeverBall: simple control, nice
Blobwars: mouse key works perfectly!
Raid'em(raidem) - perfect game!! 2 players, easy keymap, turn "eye candy" option to min
SuperTux(supertux) nice LUX game
frozen-bubble nice cute game, 2 players
Game List for our wiki page


Key mapping plan is done and test with games. All we have to do is wire the controllers and test it. That's what I'm gonna do after this blog.


After all, I've gotta say thank you to Stephen Liang. He's been putting a lot of affort on this project, working so hard quietly.

BTW.. why dose NEC use LG/Philips screen?? That's weired..

Regular CRT Monitor

Arcade Project Update

Naked Keyboard


Happy New Year!

During this holiday, Stephen, Mohak, Patty and myself went to school to do the arcade project. Mohak was doing the game search. Patty was taking care the labeling for some cables and Stephen was doing research on key mapping and he also started some soldering for the key mapping also. At that time, I set up a network for the arcade machine, so Greg can ssh there and install the arcade launcher. I had great trouble of installing the launcher since there are a lot of dependency to install for Perl.

It was a great fun day, we faced a lot of small problems and finally fixed. We spent a lot of time on researching. We found that when we actually start doing the arcade is totally different to what we expected.

Stephen and I went to college for the arcade project during the holiday, but it seems that the access card was disabled since it was holiday. So, Stephen did the rest of soldering in study area which is located in second floor.

Too bad that it looks like we are not going to finish this arcade project before Semester 2 starts. But for sure we'll arrange sometime to complete this arcade in the future. Currently the project is 60% completed. Here is the work load I would assume...

- launcher installation - 4 hours, Greg
- controller wiring - 6 hours, Stephen Liang, Nestor
- games and launcher integration and testing - 3 hours, Greg
- launcher, game, controller test - 5hours, Nestor, Greg, Stephen
- hardware installation - 5 hours

Although it seems hard, but I am still hopping we can finish it before semester start...


Installed Game List:
1. Torcs
2. quake3 demo - need to pair the keys well
3. Frets On Fire - no yum install, make failed, try rpm, may need to pair 2nd joystick also
4. NeverBall -
5. Blobwars
6. Pinball
7. LBreakOut2(lbrickbuster2)
8. Raid'em(raidem) - turn "eye candy" option to min
9. Dodgin' Diamond II (dd2)
10. Kobo Deluxe - nice
11. Njam - pc-man
12. Barbie Seahorse Adventures(seahorse-adventures) - an classic looking adventure game
13. Shippy - a nice old school classic shooting
14. Tecnoballz
15. XGalaga(xgalaxy) - a nice old school classic shooting

Keyboard logic board soldering

I did the soldering for the keyboard for our arcade machine. It has 27 wires and it's separated into 2 set, column and row. So, we have 18 columns, lets say column is A to R and Row is 1 to 9. When we press Y, it connect the row E and column 2 together, then the signal from the keyboard will be sent to the PC. Here is the photo of the keyboard chip.




We are planning to complete wiring the keyboard logic board to the controller the end of this week.

More games - Contributions of the Open Source Community

I talked to my friend Markslane, we studyed BSc in Computer Scienc together. He is the leader of the opensource game editor called "Game-Editor" (http://game-editor.com/). He suggested me some games made using his editor that we could use. These games can also run on Linux, Mac and even on Windows. I think Nestor will like this stuff :-)

http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5205
http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6326
http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6329
http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6327
http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6323
http://game-editor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5439

This is the full list of stuff:

http://game-editor.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=6&sk=v

More games...

Hi guys, I want to tell that by accident I discover a larger list of games while we were doing our labs...

In SYA710 we had this lab "Creating your own Live CD", so when I installed the livecd-tools, I took a look in each file and there were one kickstart file with this name: livecd-fedora-games, so that took my attention I opened and... there is a larger list of games in there! I'm trying to make it work, in that way we can play with that CD (a lot more easier) and determine (based in play with each game) which ones we can include.

I have been trying and I got some errors, hopefully I can make it works.

If somebody wants to take a look to the file, here is a link for a quick view:
livecd-fedora-games.

A lot of options!!

I wasn't too much into games before, now I start to wanted to try some, most of all because I saw some images about them... I still have a list about the ones I need to find some information...

Wormux
NeverBall
NetHack
Spring project
Unreal Tournament 2004, 2003 & original
Doom 3
Medal of Honor
SAVAGE: The Battle for Newerth
Planet Shift
Glest
Blobwars: Metal Blob Solid [2d platform game]
The Battle for Wesnoth
Boson
rRootage
Scorched 3D
Chromium B.S.U.
Racer, The real deal
Flight Gear

Also Nestor remind me that I need to check if they are joystick supportive controllers, so far I just could find that information about SuperTux, is not easy to find that kind of detail... keep trying.

I like a lot the game that Milton proposed, I'm a little concerned about something that I read about that one, I think is necessary to have a look deeply in the fact that the game include song files and some internal fonts that are proprietary, and their redistribution is not permitted, hope this doesn't represent any problem because I like that one....

By the way, please guys take a look to Arcade Wiki Page I put some screenshots if I get the chance I will put some more I just don't want saturate the page, better keep eliminating whatever is not ok for the arcade....

Research on soldering keyboard

I found a page about keyboard in wiki. Soldering is hard, very very small, but I think we can try it. The keyboard we have is very old. Maybe we can not press a lot of key at the same time. I found in keyboard, we can press 3 to 9 keys at the same time. I tried my laptop and 2 keyboard. But we have a lot of keys for our controller. We may have problem. Any suggestion?

I worry the old keyboard will only support to press 3 keys at the same time. And the keyboard is not ps2, we have to buy an adapter to try. Sometime I pass by my home, I see old computer with keyboard, if i found one, maybe we can use it.


Keyboard on Wiki