I put an Xbox 360 controller board in my X-Arcade Solo stick a while back to have a proper arcade stick for Xbox Live Arcade games and fighting games. The Xbox 360 controller I have has a turbo button on it but I have been thinking about adding a faster one.

If you are interested in adding the turbo button to anything, here is the parts list (all of this can be found at Radio Shack) and the schematics:

• Circuit Board (optional)
• R1 = 1K Ohm Resistor
• R2 = 10k Ohm - 100K Ohm Resistor or Variable Resistor (The lower the resistor, the faster the pulse) Start with 47k and go from there.
• C1 = .1 uF Capacitor
• 555 Timer

If you attempt this, make sure you get multiple resistors between 10k Ohms and 100k Ohms (or a variable reistor) in order to find the best pulse rate for your turbo button. I used a 22k Ohm resistor, which is about 30 button presses a second. You don’t want it to be so fast that it just registers as one long button press and you don’t want it too slow.

Note: If you are interested in converting your X-Arcade stick into an Xbox 360 stick, I used an Xbox 360 MicroCon Game Pad Pro [Gameshark or Madcatz] and 30 gauge wire. The hardest part of this mod is mounting it to the board. I used two big screws going through some tubes to keep the board raised above the buttons (See pics above). This thing is a must have for any old school gamers and arcade junkies. Some games just don’t feel right on a gamepad.

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I wrote a simple program called CamShots to capture images with a video capturing device. The application is very simple. As of now it just creates a folder on the desktop and starts adding snapshots. You can change the snapshot interval from 1-50 seconds and pause it. Pretty basic stuff. I’ll be updating this in the near future and will post any updates.

 

CamShots will work with most video capture devices. You will need the InterVideo Home Theater software as well as the .NET framework version 1.1 or higher for it to work.

See ‘CamShots Update’ for new link.

On a side note, you can use this software to capture multiple screenshots of movies, console games, tv, etc. I captured some video game screenshots to test it and made some animated .gif files with them. Here are some examples…

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Being sick of people trying to steal my car, I decided to take more drastic measures. I purchased a nanny cam on Ebay for $33 and set it up in a room over the garage to look down at my car. This thing produces a picture that is much better quality than I expected. It is in color and also has audio (which I don’t need). The only bad thing about it is that it needs a lot of light to get an image but that was to be expected.

You can connect the receiver directly to your TV, VCR, DVDR, DVR, or PC if you have a video capturing device. I will be hooking it up to the PC and writing a program for the Game Bridge, a USB video capturing device for Windows. I picked this up for $10 a few months ago, I have seen them as low as $3. I bought one just to play PS2 games on my laptop but the video stutters to much to use for gaming (maybe why they are so cheap?). It is great for snapshots though. More details coming in my next post…

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Scratch is a visual programming language meant to help kids learn the basics of programming. If I had had this as a kid, I wouldn’t have left the house. I remember having to copy pages of BASIC code just to get a circle on the screen, let alone a picture I drew.

After about 20 minutes of messing around, I made a pretty bad… thing, called Zombie Kill. I wouldn’t call it a game since you can’t lose. If you don’t shoot the zombie, he just goes right past you. It has horrible graphics, no sound, and no point. It is, however, infinitely better than anything I made as a young kid.

What you can do with Scratch is limited, but it has way more functionality than I expected. I’m sure that with each new release, it will have a lot more to offer. Don’t expect this to replace real programming languages. Scratch is great for kids, those new to programming, and anyone who likes to waste time. It is free and is availble for Windows and Mac operating systems.

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If you’re a fan of Tron the movie or Tron the arcade game, you are going to love GLTron. It’s a 3D version of the “Light Cycles” game from the Tron arcade game. There are a ton of settings that let you change speed, difficulty, and the theme among other things. It looks great and is very addictive. As of now there is no online or LAN play, but there is four-player local multiplayer.

GLTron is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Click here to download it.

 

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Are you looking for a way to play the original Jumpman without having to use an emulator? Of course you are. Thanks to Jeff Leyda, this port of the original PC version of Jumpman works on PCs of all shapes and sizes with no speed issues. The executable and source code can be downloaded here.

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