I’m just curious how many more people have plans of releasing something before the end of the year (in relation to the homebrew of the year). There’s been a little more activity than usual here, which is good… I’m just wondering whether we’re gonna get the excitement of a bunch of releases on one day again 😉 .
Unfortunately, I don’t have any tricks up my sleeves… I haven’t really had a lot of time to do any (fun) coding recently. I’ll go through some of my small games/demos that I’ve worked on over the year and try to wrap one or two up, but there’s not much time left, and I won’t really have much free time for another couple weeks.
I am sort of working one one. I just started a few days ago. It’s my first VB program, so it probably will not be done in time, especially being it will require a custom controller
I want to make an air hockey game, and use a mouse rather than d-pads.
Oh, and I want to be able to use the link port and have sound, so basically nothing worthwhile will be released in time!
Also, I have other projects that have higher importance, so don’t know when this one will get done.
Heh, that sounds similar to what I’ll probably end up releasing… a while back I started a 3D pong, which used a mouse and link cable. I did convert it to also work with the regular controller, as well as a PS2 controller. But it still has lots of work to go before it’s really a worthwhile game, but hopefully I’ll make it release-worthy so people can at least get a little enjoyment out of it.
Is it easy to interact with a mouse? I had a project where I used a mouse with an FPGA, and it seemed pretty easy. I was probably planning on using a cheap PIC for mine.
Funny we are working on basically the same thing. I figure nobody will ever play my game being you will need external hardware (well, except you might being you have a mouse already working). I have no desire to make my game work with a regular controller because it just wouldn’t be as fun. I was thinking of maybe having a turbo button, or having it so you could use both d-pads to control your paddle (so if you pushed left twice, you would go twice as fast), but it just seems like it would not work well.
Having said that, maybe we need somewhere to put standards for new hardware. It would be a bummer if both our games used the mouse, but each mouse only worked with one game. It would be like if I couldn’t use the Guitar Hero guitar with Rock Band!
There’s two different ways I’ve done a mouse w/ the VB… the first (and easiest/most accessable to everyone) is using the SNES mouse from Mario Paint, which is hardware compatible, and just requires a software read (since you need to read 32 bits rather than the 16 that the hardware read does).
The second is using the Parallax Propeller microcontroller. Here’s the thread on that from a little while ago: http://www.vr32.de/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3566&forum=2 . I really like this method because it allows tons of different peripherals, one of which is the mouse (standard PS/2), but also Playstation 2 controllers, Wii accessories, keyboard, and whatever else you want to interface to it.
And yeah, 3D pong is pretty lame w/ the regular controller. I set the right D-Pad to be fast move, left for slow move, and both for even faster… but it’s kinda awkward. The PS2 controller is better, since you can use the analog stick for variable speed, but even better was the analog stick position was the actual position of the paddle. But overall, the mouse was the most natural. I was thinking about trying the Wii Nunchuck with the stick to move, and swinging to do hit power (using the accelerometer values), and maybe spin, but I never got around to it.
