The first Gideros sample is a direct port of my Corona plasma sample (which was a port of some old assembly code from years gone by).

There is minimal code difference between the corona and gideros plasma samples. In corona you can set the colour of each tile, while in gideros you apply the colour transform.

You can download the full source here: [Download]

Almost 6 months ago, I put a 90% complete fight stick project aside to continue work on a Donkey Kong cocktail cabinet with the intention of finishing it off a few weeks later. Today, I finally put the final touches into the fight stick and can now consider the project complete 🙂

A few nights back I decided to get the project finished. First up was making sure the fight stick itself could be recognised by a PC and PS3. This failed to work. The closest I could get was a windows error saying the USB device failed to load. After some testing and investigation, it looked like the USB connector on the Dual Strike PCB was to blame. A closer look at the USB (Type B) port showed one of the internal pins had been squashed back, ensuring a bad connection. Looks like at some point the port had something lean against it, and cause the pin to come lose. I got out the soldering iron and took it off the board. It probably isn’t clear in the image below, but the top right pin (inside the port) has been lifted up and is completely loose.

A replacement part was found at Jaycar for only $3. I added it to the board, connected up the PCB to the PC and success.
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I finally got around to completing the project this weekend.

Last week I organised the glass place to measure and cut the glass top for me. I also had some small DK marquees printed up, which will sit under the glass on the table top. These were simply done at BigW at $3 each.

DK Marquee
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Something a bit different for the 11th instalment in my corona samples series – XML parsing. I’ve turned my focus onto developing a game lately, and have been playing around with the Lime engine. There are some aspects of it I’m not happy with, so began rewriting it. One part (which isn’t really part of Lime) is the XML parsing. When it loads a .tmx file, it parses the lot in one hit. It’s not too slow, but there is a noticeable pause when loading, parsing and then generating the level. I’m building a new engine, based off Lime, that will allow asynchronous loading and level generation – meaning it’s possible to have a loading bar, animation, audio, etc going at the same time.


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