Category: Computers/Tech/Games

A Resurgence of Interest in eCoder Ring

A lot of things just happened when you clicked on this article. Your computer connected to my computer, and each of these words I wrote zipped across the internet to their destination. Since this article contains words like encryption, NSA, and secret codes, it probably flagged something for the NSA along the way — you for reading about it, and me for writing about it. In some giant, government data warehouse, there’s now a record that you were here. We’re probably both on a watch list now. Welcome to the machine, and all that. About five years ago I wrote… (read more)

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New Custom $2 Raspberry Pi Case

In a previous post I shared what the case my Raspberry Pi came with: It’s big and dumb. The other day while shopping in Big Lots, I ran across the following item: (To be honest, I’m not even sure what this thing is meant to do. It looks like it’s a thing that you could put Poptarts in to put them in a kid’s lunch or something. Huh.) The wheels began turning, and for $2, I had to find out. Pretty much everything I know about using a Dremmel, I learned from watching television. I know it spins really fast… (read more)

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Raspberry Pi Round Two: PiMame

In the comments of my last Raspberry Pi post, reader Ben politely pointed out “you’re doing it wrong.” And I was. Along with a couple of other helpful suggestions, Ben also pointed me toward PiMame, which comes as a precompiled image — simply download, extract, boot, and play. Now that the raspberry Pi is out of the box and connected, I only had two goals: 01. Download/extract/configure PiMame 02. Play games. Would this one work better than my first go ’round with RetroPie? Read on! 01. Download/extract/configure PiMame I downloaded PiMame 0.7.8 from the following link: http://blog.sheasilverman.com/pimame-raspberry-pi-os-download/. I used Win32… (read more)

RobOHara

A Slice of RetroPie

Last weekend I started my first Raspberry Pi project. After reading that several people have turned their Raspberry Pies into emulation machines, I searched Google and found RetroPie, a pre-built image for the Raspberry Pi containing a ton of pre-loaded emulators. At the start of the project I had three clear goals: 01. Power up the Raspberry Pi. 02. Install RetroPie 03. Play some games! How did things turn out? Read on! 01. Power up the Raspberry Pi. This project began with my Raspberry Pi still in the shipping packaging. Along with my Pi I ordered a red plastic case… (read more)

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A Slice of Raspberry Pi

I suspect the vast majority of my readers either (a) already know what a Raspberry Pi is or (b) don’t know and wouldn’t care. I’m writing this on the slim chance that a third group exists, a group of people who might be interested in the Raspberry Pi but haven’t looked into them yet. So maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones. The Raspberry Pi is an ARM-based computer that’s about the size of a credit card (you can tell how small it is in the picture above), which makes it perfect for “projects”. Because it’s ARM-based it runs… (read more)

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New Review of Commodork

Joe Barlow over at SwordOfPixels.com posted a review of Commodork on his website recently (yesterday). I wrote and published Commodork back in 2006, so it’s always interesting to see new reviews of the book pop up. Joe’s review echoes what a lot of reviews of Commodork have stated, which is essentially that their personal stories of growing up with calling BBSes mirror my own. I have had people in Germany e-mail me just to tell me that they could totally relate to some of the stories in Commodork. I love hearing things like that. Joe added Amazon links to Commodork… (read more)

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Goodbye, Milk Crate!

A couple of months back I bought a flat screen television to use as a monitor for some of my old computers. After posting the following picture, the number one response I received was, “nice milk crate.” While digging around in the garage this weekend I found some scrap wood left behind by the previous owners and decided it would make a nice shelf for the television. I decided the perfect height would be “two Commodore disk drives, plus an inch or so.” Not very scientific, I know — rounding up, I decided on 8 inches. Once the sides were… (read more)

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Commodorks in Carolina

A couple of months back one of my online friends (Mikey) mentioned to me he was looking to buy a Commodore 64. The next morning I went out to the garage, got one of my remaining spare Commodores, boxed it up and mailed it to him. Although I have run out of spare 1541 drives, Mikey had little trouble picking one up on eBay. It just so happens that Mikey lives about 10 miles away from the hotel I’ve been staying in for the past several days. Mikey expressed an interest in obtaining some more disks for his his new… (read more)

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Removing Malware from my own Site

A few months ago I spun up a new website, SpriteCastle.com. There’s no real content there yet — it’s more of a proof of concept site at this point. Last night after finishing up the latest episode of You Don’t Know Flack I decided to do some tweaking to the Sprite Castle. When I opened the site in Google Chrome, I got the following message: Crap. I know WordPress has been under attack lately, so my first assumption was that the site had been compromised. Bypassing Chrome’s warning, I opened the site and searched for any sign of malware. I… (read more)

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PC Games For Sale: 40 Cents Each

I had heard of the website Bundle-in-a-Box before, but never really looked into it until one of my friends Robb Sherwin had one of his games added to a bundle. What Bundle-in-a-Box does is group several games together and allow their customers to pay whatever price they think the bundle is worth. The games are downloadable and DRM-free so you can install them wherever and to whatever you want. This week’s bundle contains five games and the minimum price you can pay is $2, which works out to be 40 cents per game. If you go crazy and pay more… (read more)

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