Xistic - Slashdot User

Submission + - NESBot: Tool Assisted Speedrun on Real Hardware (instructables.com)

Submitted by Xistic on Saturday February 12, 2011 @12:37AM

Xistic writes: For many years tool assisted speedruns (TAS) were purely theoretical and the domain of emulators. No longer! Using an Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller to drive an actual Nintendo console, pjgat09 plays back prerecorded input to beat Super Mario Brothers in record time. The selection of possible games is limited. 'If the game relies on any uninitialized memory for randomness, or if it is heavily based on console timing, it may not work. In the case of Super Mario Bros however, as long as the button presses start play back at the right time, the movie will play back correctly.' The author includes complete instructions on how to setup the device.

Submission + - XBMC discontinues Xbox support

Submitted by Xistic on Thursday May 27, 2010 @10:53PM

Xistic writes: From the http://xbmc.org/>XBMC home page: "XBMC (XBMP really) started as a program for modified XBOX consoles. In the following years, XBMC has grown into a multi-platform, multi-architecture media center that runs on most standard hardware. The hardware and legal limitations of the XBOX were always a concern and the Team has instead focused on running on the hardware that most people already have.The last official release for the XBOX by the XBMC team was Atlantis, over 18 months ago. Since then, one brave soul (Arnova) has been merging code from the main codebase into the XBOX branch in our repository. Because there were many users out there that took advantage of these updates, we had no problem with this. But times have changed. The XBOX has hard limits for what it can handle. Some users are satisfied with these limits, and we encourage them to use XBMC there if they are happy. But it is a popular misconception that official XBOX development is still taking place by the team, so we have decided to set it free. We have enough on our plates already, and worrying about a deprecated platform just increases our workload. A few days ago the XBOX branch was finally removed from our subversion repository."

Comment Current Art Critics (Score 1) 214

by Xistic on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @12:59AM (#26808313) Attached to: On Game Developers and Legitimacy

Current art critics will probably never widely accept video games as art. There was a penny arcade strip which explained this trend throughout history. (Someone will probably reply to this with a link.)

Ultimately games will be widely accepted as art. But it won't happen until the current crop of respected art critics dies of old age, their names are quickly forgotten, and they are replaced by a generation that was raised with games and knows wherein the art lies. Then they will go on to snub there own generation's struggling art form and the circle of life is complete.

Working Calculator Created in LittleBigPlanet 142

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @06:11PM from the impressive dept.

jamie pointed out a really impressive creation from the LittleBigPlanet beta. The game allows the creation of puzzles from a collection of simple objects and tools. A player called upsilandre used 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires, 430 pistons, and a variety of other objects to create a functioning calculator that will do decimal/binary conversions as well as addition and subtraction. The creation does well to illustrate the potential for amazing creativity in level design. Another user recently designed a level to play the Final Fantasy X theme song. LittleBigPlanet is almost finished and set to be released later this month, though the controls may be refined in a future patch. We recently discussed a student level-design event at the Parsons New School for Design and Technology.

Comment Re:Free Time (Score 2, Interesting) 29

by Xistic on Friday September 12, 2008 @09:54AM (#24977513) Attached to: A General Guide For Mod Creation

What I'm suggesting is that you can't rely on free time when it comes about randomly. You have to set aside the time to make it happen. It was still free time, but it was partitioned off just for this purpose.

For the first 3 months or I would work on it in the evening. I wasn't very focused and work was slow. One day on a whim I went to bed an hour early and got up an hour early and did more in one hour than I had done all week. Maybe I'm easily distracted but this is what worked for me.

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