Fun & Games

If you have to pay taxes on virtual property, can you insure your virtual property? Sunday’s New York Times picked up the theme in The Game is Virtual. The Profit is Real (5/29), which discussed the growing market for virtual property used in on-line games like Second Life, The Sims, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft. Players buy and sell virtual property on sites like eBay, Ige, and Gamingopenmarket, with the Times noting annual profits of 25k, 100k or more taxable to the gamers. Some of the sites even allow on-line charitable contributions. Link.

History of the video game controller- How did the current home-console controllers come to be? How have they evolved? You may have noticed some similarities between the current generation controllers, or between them and the previous generations of controllers. So, how do they all tie together? [via] Link.

Making your own homebrew PSP docking station “When my PSP arrived, it was always in my hands, but a couple of days later, the problem of having a place to put the console became stronger and stronger (especially when you have nothing but your standard pack)… I began to feel anxious… What if it falls down the table? And what if, while is on the bed, I sit on it? And so on…” Link.

Here’s a great Phidgets project. We chose to build a ubiquitous version of the 80’s arcade classic “Whack the Mole” since we thought it would be a fun, addictive way of integrating the computer with a really physical game. To make the game a little more sophisticated than the original we made a multiplayer game where one person using a virtual version of our game can connect to the physical game board. Link.

Handy for homebrew GB games- GBAccelerator is our latest and most innovative modification for the Game Boy Advance & GBA SP. GBAccelerator allows you to change the speed of the GBA to one of four speeds including: normal, fast, ultra and slow-motion by simply simultaneously pressing three GBA buttons. GBAccelerator is useful for a number of games and applications. Link.

Good resource for getting started in making your own DS games- Tutorial 1: Setting up the development evironment and building an example application that displays text output and reads the touch screen. Tutorial 2: Using the framebuffer mode of the Nintendo DS to draw to the screen. Also explains a bit about the Vertical Blank Interrupt. Tutorial 3: Detecting and acting on key presses. Link.