Analog Joypad for your Retro PC

January 27th, 2012, 01:44 Posted By: wraggster


Part of the fun with old computers is playing some old school games, and while you could play them with a keyboard it is much more fun with a joystick. You can get old joysticks all day long on auction sites, but you have to watch out. Some are digital, which wont work for many games on many systems. Some were cheap to begin with and probably worn out, and many are flight sticks … ever play pac-man with a giant flight stick?
What I really wanted was a game pad like device for my 1986 Apple //c , using one of the modern thumbstick analog controllers. Using a thumbstick out of an old XBOX(1) controller, some generic parts from Radio Shack, and a little bit of effort , I ended up with exactly what I wanted.
Join us after the break and I will show you how to get there!

http://hackaday.com/2012/01/26/analo...your-retro-pc/

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

HP To Open Source WebOS

January 26th, 2012, 03:35 Posted By: wraggster

This year the artists formerly known as Palm had quite a rough few months with HP dumping the hardware side of their own webOS mobile computing platform – their most recent move, having been announced just last month, is live today: open sourced webOS for all. While the actual main product which will be known as Open webOS 1.0 will not be released until September, they've already got the Enyo piece of the pie available today."

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/01...n-source-webos

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

Raspberry Pi 'should achieve double iPhone 4S performance'

January 26th, 2012, 03:31 Posted By: wraggster

Games studios called on to supply educational content for micro computer

A personal computer built to be no bigger than a credit card is said will “double iPhone 4S performance across a range of content".
Eben Upton, the executive director of the Raspberry Pi project, claimed the $25 micro computer boasts an industry-leading GPU.

"I was on the team that designed the graphics core, so I'm a little biased here, but I genuinely believe we have the best mobile GPU team in the world at Broadcom in Cambridge," Upton said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.
The vision behind the Raspberry Pi project is to reignite interest in personal computer programing at a young age.
With its relatively low price, HDMI output and mobile form factor, Upton believes his team has built a device that can inspire young people to start coding for themselves.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...4S-performance

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

QuakeCon 2012 dates announced

January 25th, 2012, 02:37 Posted By: wraggster

This year's QuakeCon - the annual id Software clambake - takes place in Dallas, Texas 2nd to 5th August, Bethesda has announced.Getting out there might not be too cheap, but if you do make it entry to the event itself is free of charge. See the official QuakeCon site for more details of how to get in.As usual, the event will take over the Hilton Anatole Hotel and host North America's largest LAN party, though specific details on exactly what else will be on show have not yet been announced.With Rage finally out the door, id Software boss John Carmack recently confirmed that the studio can now concentrate solely on the long-awaited Doom 4. Will we be getting our first glimpse of the game during this year's QuakeCon?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ates-announced

There are 1 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

Raspberry Pi runs XBMC; reliably decodes 1080p

January 25th, 2012, 02:30 Posted By: wraggster


This is the Raspberry Pi board, an ARM based GNU-Linux computer. We’ve heard a little bit about it, but it recently garnered our attention when the machine was shown running XBMC at 1080p. That’s a lot of decoding to be done with the small package, and it’s taken care of at the hardware level.
Regular readers will know we’re fans of the XBMC project and have been looking for a small form factor that can be stuck on the back of a television. We had hoped it would be the BeagleBaord but that never really came to fruition. But this really looks like it has potential, and with a price tag of $35 (that’s for the larger 256MB RAM option) it’s a no-brainer.
Now there’s still a lot of rumors out there. We came across one thread that speculated the device will not decode video formats other than h.264 very well since it uses hardware decoding for that codec only. We’ll reserve judgement until there’s more reliable info. But you can dig through this forum thread where the XMBC dev who’s been working with the hardware is participating in the discussion.

http://hackaday.com/2012/01/24/raspb...0p/#more-66109

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

First ever digital PC chart scheduled

January 25th, 2012, 01:38 Posted By: wraggster

Trade group UKIE pledges to push ahead with PSN and Xbox Live charts

UKIE will publish a digital chart for PC games next month, the trade body has announced.
It’s the first measure of downloadable video game sales and UKIE says it will be improved in the months ahead.

The basic PC chart will be made public but companies which share their data will be able to view more detailed figures on the PC download market. Chart participation is open to UKIE members and video games companies.
UKIE will continue to provide boxed game sales in conjunction with GfK Chart-Track. As previously reported by MCV, the trade organisation will be working on Xbox Live and PSN charts next.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...t-is-scheduled

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

Gaikai months away from full-game streaming

January 23rd, 2012, 23:07 Posted By: wraggster

Gaikai founder David Perry has revealed that the cloud gaming service is ready to go live with full games, not just the demos it currently hosts, within months.
Facebook remains the company's initial focus, with the service's launch on the social network imminent, but games will subsequently spread to other websites such as YouTube, Best Buy and those belonging to publishers such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft.
In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Perry said that full-game streaming will be live "about three months from when Facebook launches, about 90 days from that."
Adding: "If you give me your game today I can put your game in front of more than 100 million people, easily. Quite honestly if we put you on the homepage of YouTube right now on it's own, you're already hitting that number."
Perry also commented on cloud gaming competitor OnLive, which already offers full games through its online service, MicroConsole and Android app.
"There's a very big difference between the way we're doing it and the way OnLive is doing it. They have to modify the game, they have to get the source code to the game. Gaikai doesn't require modification of the game.
"To give you an example The Witcher II was given to us and them at the same time. We went live with Witcher II immediately and now four or five months later they still don't have that live, and that's because they have to touch the code. The whole structure of Gaikai is about not touching the code. When we show World Of Warcraft it's the real thing, it's not like we had to go and tweak it to get it to work. That means that every game in history remains compatible with our solution."
Earlier in the month, Gaikai's chief product officer suggested that one of the current console makers would bow out of the hardware race at this year's E3, leading to speculation that Gaikai may be set to partner with a company in order to offer a cloud solution. Perry warns against underestimating the importance of cloud to gaming's future.
"You do not want to be the console that can't do this. You do not want to be the retail website that doesn't have playable games on it. You don't want to be the gaming website that you can't buy a game from," he said.
"[Console manufacturers] have got to take it seriously because it's better for consumers. I would play a lot more games if I fired up my Xbox, clicked on a game and it started playing straight away. I don't want to take your console from your cold dead hands, that's not the case at all.
"You're going to continue to play the way you play, but just imagine that you could have an opinion on all games because you've been able to try all of them. Each evening, flick through four or five games that just came out."

http://www.edge-online.com/news/gaik...game-streaming

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

Intel Relying On Ice Cream Sandwich For Tablet Push

January 22nd, 2012, 20:44 Posted By: wraggster

"Intel thinks tablets live and die by their software, not their hardware. So as they get ready for a big push into the mobile device market, they're relying on Ice Cream Sandwich to provide competition with Apple's products. From the article: 'The company has largely watched from the sidelines as mobile device makers have used processors based on ARM's microarchitecture to power their products in recent years. This despite the fact that Intel actually predicted the rise of what it called "mobile Internet devices," or MIDs, several years ago, and built a chip, Atom, for such gadgets. For all that [Intel CEO Paul Otellini] touts the software over the hardware when it comes to tablets, Intel knows it's got a lot of ground to make up to wrest design wins away from ARM. The Medfield System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is a promising but still uncertain step in that direction.' Otellini thinks the tablet market will get much more competitive over the next year as ICS devices mature and Windows 8 devices arrive.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...or-tablet-push

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

Old Republic sales concerns 'are overblown' - Pachter

January 21st, 2012, 22:15 Posted By: wraggster

Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter has suggested that concerns over Star Wars: The Old Republic sales are "overblown".
Writing in a note sent to investors this afternoon, he said: "EA shares have been under assault over the past two months (and especially the past week), as many of ourcompetitors have opined that the company's MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic was tracking well below 'consensus' expectations."Some of our competitors have suggested that the 'consensus' first quarter sales estimate was 3 million units, or over a million above our own estimate, which we believe is not only unrealistic, but borders on the absurd.
"Activision Blizzard's World of Warcraft, the most successful MMO of all time, sold 1.5 million units in its first month, and an additional 2.5 million units in its first year, representing sales of around 50,000 units per week after the first few weeks."
Pachter thinks about 1.7 million copies of The Old Republic have been sold to date. "We continue to expect Star Wars to have a meaningful impact on revenue and earnings growth in upcoming quarters. As mentioned previously, we expect sell-in of 2 million units in Q3:12 (with an additional 1 million units next year)," he said.
EA has "probably" invested close to half a billion dollars in Star Wars: The Old Republic, Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz said earlier this week.
The publisher has said that The Old Republic will turn a profit if it manages to retain half a million subscribers, and claimed over Christmas that the title is the fastest-growing subscription MMO in history.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...blown-pachter/

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here

Street Fighter X Tekken: Welcome to the festival

January 21st, 2012, 00:14 Posted By: wraggster

I remember the days of sitting in my buddy's room, losing repeatedly to his Vega as my Dhalsim flailed in front of pixelated, braying elephants. With every loss came the time to give up the controller for the next player in line. Depending on how many people were over, a sort of cheering section would develop. Fueled by Dr. Pepper and bags of potato chips, these impromptu parties are memories that I'm sure I share with many gaming folks.

Street Fighter x Tekken is doing its best to recreate those moments. We already know it's bringing together two of the biggest fighting game franchises on the market, thus creating a huge, varied cast. The Tekken characters have been given the Street Fighter IV treatment, creating a stylized, almost cartoonish look. Their new animations are just as stylized. They're clearly ready to party.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/20/st...-the-festival/

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here