So every week or so I go to my junk box and look through the parts I’m not using. I think to myself, “Hunter, do you need this or is it taking up space?”. The answer is always “taking up space”, hence my penchant for soldering (taping, hot gluing, welding) things together. This week, it was a slim ps2. Taking the wallclock (microscope edition) apart, I stripped it of a couple of printed circuits (don’t reeeeaaaly need that last row of keys do we?). A disassembly of a ps2 eyetoy camera revealed a tightly integrated circuit board with a sharp L angle. For those of you who have never played eyetoy, it’s essentially project Natal with a low resolution webcam. Fantastically fun at parties, not particularly lasting for single player.
Removing the ps2 slim casing revealed a tightly integrated mobo, not a lot of room to fit things in, but a couple of good screw-points for attaching the new screen. From there things came together reasonably well. The eyetoy camera has 2 extra LED lights and a light sensor module that needed to be front-facing. Using a lighter from a coworker, I heated up a large nail and poked a couple of holes opposite the original videophone bezel. Lucky for me, the eyetoy front and back focal lenses attach seperately and I was able to connect them through the front camera and secure it tightly with some superglue. This also lined the camera circuits up l-bracket style, which made for a handy slip-over for the top casing of the ps2. I attached the rest of the videophone circuits together in a vertical sandwich along the back of the ps2 casing. This worked well for two reasons. First, no capacitors are touching, and second it gave me space to feed the extra cabling through (video and usb). It’s a tight fit, but it helps keep the clutter down.
New Zipit Update! I’ve gotten ScummVM working with the new kernel. Xserver-kdrive too, so our memory usage is down again.
You’ll need to edit your .scummvmrc file and add the game entries by hand (I still don’t have the keys as joystick or mouse in), but they play fine. Update your git tree and remove the zipit temp directory, Bitbake intltool, then bitbake xserver-kdrive. Intltool will fail unless you bitbake it directly, and not as a dependency include. Set the graphics scale to 1x and everything is gravy. Screenshots of the Scummvm selector screen and the Monkey Island EGA DRM scheme are below. This is running even better than the dosbox build as there’s not x86 conversion happening!
Every once in a while you come across a busted piece of kit that you know you make useful again. This week, it was an ACN Video Phone. For the unknowing, ACN sells ip phone/video phone service bundled to their video phone hardware. On the upside, the resale value is very low. On the downside, this means it’s worthless without the monthly fees.… Or IS IT??
The short story: The flash worked and I’ve got everything working that worked before. The long story?
After a power out blanked my wallclock’s memory, I was not eager to go searching through ten year old websites looking for a new terminal emulator. Luckily I found a ten year old NES emulator that loads fine! Behold wallclock 2.0, NES edition! Also be sure to peep the ancient medical tablet that is pulling duty as my new serial terminal. Fun!
A couple of months ago, Mark and I were playing some wormux on the PC. I had all my characters and teams set up, and all my macros just the way I liked them. The next day my computer crashed and lost everything. To prevent this from happening again, we sat down and wrote this python program, “Save Game Saver”. Basically you set up a profile for a game (location of save game), then it allows you to upload those saves to gmail. Each upload is versioned in gmail, so you can store and retrieve multiple saves you uploaded on any day for any game. Considering Steam and Xbox are both moving towards this internally, this would be kind of a stepping stone till game developers get off their asses and figure it out. Mark and I both found it really useful though, so go ahead and download it or alter the source. As usual, it’s GPLv2.0.
As it turns out, with a little bit of effort you can put together a cheap (50$), handheld, wireless, graphical wikipedia browser ala the HitchHiker’s Guide.
So I’ve got a new pet project, the zipit z2. If you don’t know this 50$ handheld is actually a moderately powerful computer. 32 megs of ram, a 2g sd card, and a 300mhz arm processor means I can do quite a bit of interesting stuff (we’ve certainly worked with less!). After doing the prerequisite install of Angstrom linux, I decided to see what it would take to run tor and privoxy on it.
