Hey All,
Maker Faire is in one week! Holy cow! Not enough time to get everything done!
We are on Make: again, this time talking about the quest to make the worlds largest arcade game!
My own exhibit will be about PiPlay and my own arcade cabinet that I’m building:
That’s all for this week!
Have a great weekend!
-Shea
Hey All,
First week of the semester is done! Can’t say everything went off without a hitch. Ran into a nasty timezone issue between servers that I just couldn’t figure out. One image, two servers cloned from that image. When pulling the info from Python one reported UTC, the other Eastern. Tried a bunch of different ways to force Eastern, but eventually used this:
from datetime import datetime
from pytz import timezone
fmt = "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S"
# Current time in UTC
now_utc = datetime.now(timezone('UTC'))
print now_utc.strftime(fmt)
# Convert to US/Eastern time zone
now_eastern = now_utc.astimezone(timezone('US/Eastern'))
print now_eastern.strftime(fmt)
So yeah, that was a fun couple days trying to make sure our data wasn’t 4 hours off 🙂 Also, we might be getting hit by a Tropical Storm / Hurricane on Monday. Yay.
Onto the cool stuff! Maker Faire Orlando!
I am working on two projects for Maker Faire. The first is with Factur and FamiLAB. We are making the worlds LARGEST arcade cabinet! It is so awesome. I can’t wait for the electronics to come in so I can help wire it up. I’ll be posting more details as we get closer to the Faire!
The top panel was recently added on, but I couldn’t get a good picture of it because it is about an inch from touching the ceiling of the warehouse, and I just couldn’t get a good angle on it. This thing is massive! It’s a beast!
My personal project is a new modular arcade cabinet.
This is a 3 piece cabinet that breaks down into sections for easy movement, transporation, and customization. My main requirement was that it had to fit in my PT Cruiser, everything from there was negotiable. This is what it looks like so far:
1/3 Model. Cat for Scale.
Team working the ShopBot CNC Machine.
Also!
3D Printed a Bulbasaur using glow in the dark filament!
Have a good weekend all!
-Shea
Hey All,
I feel like I have a ton on my plate and nothing to show….yet. Working on PiPlay, our new remote controller system, an arcade game for Orlando IX, and an arcade machine for Maker Faire Orlando. It’s going to be a rough couple of months 🙂
This weekend is Community Effort Orlando, an annual fighting game tournament held near the attractions. I’ve never been to CEO, but I’m really looking forward to it. Street Fighter V is going to be playable, as well as Tekken 7. I’m also going to be able to play a lot of arcade games 😀
Have a good weekend!
-Shea
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!!
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
Hey All,
Sorry for the super late post. The weather changes here in Florida knocked me on my butt. I’ve been in bed for the past two days trying to get over this cold. Going from 40 degrees to 70 to 80 back to 40 just messes with me. It also didn’t help that I ran myself ragged on Friday.
IAAPA
So Friday was the “members of the public” day at IAAPA. IAAPA stands for International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, which means that if you ever wanted to see how a ride works, or where to get new arcade machines, or pretty much anything within the amusement / coin op sector, this is the place. I go every year and it is always a blast. The biggest noticeable trend this year is how un-3d everything is. 2 years ago every ride and game had a 3D gimmick to it. Now, pretty much nothing is 3D except for the big ride experiences.
This year some of my coworkers went with me. They enjoyed themselves.
Super Smash Bros.
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U came out this weekend. Holy crap it is amazing. I had friends over on Friday, we played 8 player smash, and it was a riot. I will have the image of me playing as Samus getting the smash ball and taking out all 7 of the other players in one final smash attack burned into my memory for a very long time.
It’s a beautiful, well made, extensive game. I have no idea how long it is going to take me to unlock everything.
The game also includes support for Nintendo’s new NFC characters called Amiibos. Think Skylanders but different. For now, the way they work is dependant on each game. For Mario Kart 8, it just unlocks new outfits. In Smash Bros, they act as a super smart CPU character. The figures are really well made and look good sitting on display.
I’m still trying to get some of the NFC info from them. I’d love to write a program to back up the data, but it’s hard finding info on the MIFARE Ultralight chip it identifies as.
If you have any info please let me know!
Have a good week all,
-Shea
Hey All,
Thank you so much for your backings and support. Over 400% funded! What did I do to celebrate?
I got a delicious post-Kickstarter celebratory Icee 🙂
Updates
To keep you all updated on my progress, I created this:
As I finish tasks (or add new ones) I will be updating this board (notice the green filled in dots at the bottom) and letting everyone know.
PiPlay Case
I got the PiPlay case in my hands last night. It looks and feels great. There is only a minor alteration that needs to be done.
Everyone who backed a tier with the case will receive this version that has Kickstarter Edition branding.
PiPlay
Lots of cool work is being done on PiPlay. Theme support is now built in, but it does have some quirks. We are fixing that, and it should be part of the PiPlay 0.8 beta 4 release.
Bartop
I got in a Bartop Arcade Kit from Rich’s Arcade today. I am going to take pictures as I build it, and put that up as it’s own post.
Enjoy!
-Shea Silverman
Hey All,
Just got back from a neat tech talk that was put on buy a bunch of alumni/coworkers. Some very cool things were shown, like Google Glass and Wearscript.
Kickstarter & PiPlay
11 days to go, and I’m at 298% funded. This is crazy! PiPlay 0.8 Beta 3 was release to positive results, and Beta 4 is being worked on as I type this. A lot of enhancements, fixes, and some new emulators are being added to the distro.
I’ve ordered a few encoders which should be arriving by next week, and I can start implementing those into the software.
I was sent this link (http://iambuildingapicade.tumblr.com/) a few days ago, which chronicles the building of a Raspberry Pi arcade cabinet. It’s really well written and highly detailed.
I’ve also started a mini cabinet build. I purchased this kit and I’m looking forward to building it ( with all the extra time I have… /sarcasm )
Exciting times 🙂
-Shea
Hey All,
It has been a long week. Star Trek Into Darkness was AMAZING! Go see it now. Stop reading. Go to your theater, watch it, then come back here and finish reading. It was that good.
SanderSiezen has made a really slick cocktail arcade cabinet, powered by PiMAME. His entire build log has been published at his site. I’m really impressed by the hinge used to hide the controls. Great Job!
BarCamp Orlando
BarCamp Orlando is this weekend. It’s basically a tech gathering un-conference. People meet up in a central area, sign up to do talks, speak about awesome things, and network, all while enjoying the bar scene around downtown.
I am hoping to do some talking about PiMAME and the Raspberry Pi.
Have a great weekend everyone!
-Shea
edit: Added dual stick configuration to advmame.rc
Hey all,
Here is a working config for the XGaming X-Arcade Tankstick! The base of this comes from the very helpful site: http://www.raspberry.cat/20130203/pimame-i-x-arcade/
The first step is to edit /etc/rc.local and include this line before “exit 0”: Continue reading
Hey all,
This is just for testing purposes, but if you like to live on the cutting edge, I’m making available the beta/pre-release/testing release of PiMAME 0.5!
It’s based off the PiMAME 0.3 image, with the Uploader file size limit set to 200MB, and the Snapshot artwork in AdvMENU.
Let me know if you have any issues with it!
-Shea