About a year ago, I wrote many, many Android apps. Some of them were games. All of them were written under a “one app in one day” constraint and as such the games never had any sound. No sound effects, no background music, no waveform generation, nothing. Fast forward a year and they’ve all become open source on GitHub. I’d wanted to update them all while re-using as much code as possible. How then was I to maximize the effect (all the games get all the features) while minimizing the effort of adding sound to all of those previous games simultaneously? And how best to share the effort with other Android programmers? In this, the first of a three part article series, you’ll find out. For part 1, I create the project, setup the environment, make a plan, and update the waveform generation code on my currently in-market apps. You can follow-along with this article series in real-time by watching the commit log to the Android Simple Game Audio project on GitHub. And stay-tuned for the upcoming part 2, wherein I become a Foley artist and make use of some interesting and (not quite) antiquated technology.
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If you grew up in the 80s or early nineties, there’s a good chance you remember the AD&D goldbox series from SSI. These were top-down strategic RPG games based on the advanced dungeons and dragons pen and paper RPG series. While the first (Pools of Radiance) was my favorite, there were at least 10 or 11 others to play. Then there’s the Elder Scrolls, Fallout, X-Com, Master of Magic, Wizardry, Bards Tale, Albion, Superhero League of Hoboken, and about 1000 others. These games were great fun back in the day, but with some of the new improvements to DosBox you can actually improve the original experience on your Android handset or tablet.
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Here’s a quick pro-tip for a lazy Sunday. Want to run an obscure Linux app on your rooted android tablet? Maybe you want to do some Wireshark Snooping, run a Linux game with sound, or download a set of Linux images at maximum speed? With the convergence of a few awesome technologies, we can now install and run pretty much any Linux application or environment on your Android device. Follow the steps below or check out some of the example photos of apps running on my Dell Streak 7.
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While I sit here in bed, my body fighting the last remnants of a flu virus that had me knocked out for days, I am reminded of the past times I’ve been bedridden. Post-surgery, post-motorcycle accidents, post-European travel, etc. I’ve been knocked down plenty, but I always manage to make the best of it. This time I figured I would post up a preview of my (still in-progress) fourth book. It’s in the very early stages, but not too early for constructive criticism and a great deal of improvement across the board.
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I’ve been slowing rolling out some structural and organizational changes to the site. Visitors will be seeing the changes within the next day or two. Apologies for any downtime that may occur.
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A few applications I’ve written can only be categorized as ‘utility’ applications. Lifestyle applications are of a similar vein.
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A number of Android apps I’ve written are related to the creation of documents and other stores of information.
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A number of Android applications I’ve written (not counting the whistles) are related to audio and the production of sound.
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A number of Android Applications I’ve written are tools related to networking, file, and system management.
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A number of Android applications I’ve written have involved the encryption of Obfuscation of files or text.
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