May 29

Friday Post: BeagleBone Splatoon

Hey All,

Happy Friday!

Today Nintendo released a whole bunch of new Amiibos that were highly sought after.  I was in line at WalMart at midnight and had a lot of fun.  Met a bunch of cool people in line.  We were laughing and comparing game collections, and then the electronics guy comes out and tell us there are 6 Amiibo.  Not 6 of the 9 characters.  Just 6 Amiibo total.  3 Pac-Man and 3 Charizard.  I was 7th in line.  We could only laugh at the ridiculousness.  On the plus side, I picked up Splatoon! It is just as amazing as the demo!  If you have a Wii U and like FPS / 3PS this is a must.

The only Amiibo I was after was the Silver Mario.  I mean, come on, Silverman, Silver Mario.  It was a must buy.  There was no line at my GameStop so I was able to get one without a problem, it was just that was all they had.  This whole product line is crazy.  People going crazy over little figures.  Gotta catch em all!

In other news,  I picked up a Beagle Bone Black and I am working on testing PiPlay on that.  Initial tests look good.  It runs Ubuntu, and has some quirks, but I was able to get Mednafen, CaveStory, and DGen working without issue.

Look for more updates regarding that soon!

Have a good weekend all.

-Shea

May 22

Friday Post: Happy 90th Birthday Grandma!

Hey All,

First off, Happy 90th Birthday to my Grandma B!!  Love ya!

It’s been a hectic few weeks.  The migration has gone pretty well.  I have some more stuff to move over, but I’m happy with it.  The server is so powerful.

Mark and I are going to be bringing up a new service for gamebox art soon to help with PiPlay.  I have also been hard at work on some electronics stuff, and Mark has been doing some cool coding.

I’m really looking forward to the next month.  I have been pulled in a lot of directions, took a few breaks, but I think I’m finding the right thing to move forward with.

I can’t wait for the next part of this ride.

Have a good weekend everyone!

-Shea

May 15

Friday Post: F-Zero AX

Hey All,

So, I used to collect arcade games, but when I moved, I had to sell my collection.  Now that I own a house with a garage, I’m able to start rebuilding my mini arcade (and using PiPlay in the mean time 🙂 ).

One of my favorites and prized machines was an F-Zero AX.  This is the companion to the GameCube’s F-Zero GX.  It has a magnetic card reader, which allows you to save your pilot data between racers, and has a gamecube memory card slot which can access your save data.

I got very lucky that my original machine went up for sale, so I was able to repurchase it!!

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The board it uses is called the TriForce, which is a regular GameCube with more memory.  The game is on optical media, but rather than using gamecube optical discs, it uses GD-ROMs.  Yep, the same media used in the Dreamcast.  In fact, the platform is a collaboration between Sega, Namco, and Nintendo (hence, TriForce).  The racing cabinet is a standard Namco / Sega model.

It’s really awesome, and I’m so glad to have it back.

Have a good weekend!

-Shea

May 14

I’m Back! Thanks to my new host vNucleus

Hey All,

Hopefully I didn’t worry you all too much.  I’m kinda embarrassed to admit this, but for the past few weeks, I’ve been effectively locked out of a lot of my web apps due to my old host’s server not being able to handle the load.  I’ve been with them for 3 years, and in that time these applications have grown exponentially.  I have sadly outgrown them, and for a while was worried about where I could go.

Good hosting isn’t cheap and it’s worth every penny.  I looked at AWS, but that would have cost me a small fortune for the amount of bandwidth I use.  Some VPS providers would have been good, but I don’t have the time to manage every part of my server.

I’m very lucky to have a good friend who owns the hosting company vNucelus, and has graciously offered me space on his servers.  Everything was migrated today and it all seems to be running super smoothly!

I’m glad to be able to post again, and I hope you are excited to read again.

Thanks for sticking with me!

-Shea Silverman