Awesome photo here as well.

Register

We're aiming for a very retro 80s-ish look here. Here's a sneak peek...

The prints should be ready monday I've been told, and I'm expecting the glass pane on wednesday, the day of the show. This saturday is wood-shop day, and if all goes well we'll have a pretty spiffy cabinet on display next wednesday.

Fingers crossed!

[Quick update: we've got the prints, they're looking very nice, and I just got a call from the glass pane people, we'll have it tomorrow...]

Commander, by Ephemere Games.

An action-oriented multiplayer tower defense. You can upgrade your defenses, and have to play an active role shooting at the enemies as well. I'm missing play-test footage of this, so I put up their official video for now.

Fuzzer, by Henk Boom.

Single/multiplayer isometric racing game. Shooting your opponents makes their car veer off course. 

Game Game Videogame, by Joachim Despland.

4 players armed with laser rifles try to get hold of a diamond. Once you get it, you score point by doing a little victory dance.

Pax Brittanica, by No Fun Games.

Four player real-time strategy game, you use your launch button to release waves of attack vessels.

Verteidiger, by Kenneth Backus

Verteidiger is a 4 player Defender-inspired game, where player share control of the game. Player one can move the cannon left, player 2 controls right movements, player 3 can launch missiles, and player 4 can detonate them.

As of writing, the cabinet is in basic working condition. It has been thanks to my nice colleagues at 8D Technologies who have set up and kept the machine running while we were away working as consultants in France. Since we came back in 2009, we haven't done much with this cab, and did not really revisit our homebrew arcade joystick projects. With this project, we're planning to get back to it in a big way. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back to the "Arcade Royale" cabinet project. The idea (for those too lazy to go read the launch page) is to create an Indie game showcase arcade cabinet. We're concentrating on local developers, but the project is open to any indie game developers that might be interested in getting their games shown to the public. The arcade will be exhibited at a special event that will take place in the first week of november. After this initial show, the plan is to find a good home for it, a place where the general public could access it, and play some cool indie games. (More on this later.)

So, enough talk. The first order of the day is to get the parts needed to finish up the cab. We're missing quite a few core components. I'm going to concentrate on the electronics and accessories today.

A few background notes. The controller for the joystick is not currently up to spec, there are 4 inputs missing, so we'll need an extra controller. Also, the wiring job is a bit of a mess. I've spotted a few bad contacts that intermittently manifest themselves. To avoid bad suprises, I've got a plan to redo the wiring using off the shelf wire harnesses. We'll probably want a few extra buttons to allow for tweaking the cabinet's settings without resorting to a real physical keyboard. We've picked Windows 7 as an operating system. We're just going with the crowd here, most candidate games are using Windows-compatible game frameworks. From our discussions so far, it's been established that mapping the joysticks and buttons as keyboard keys will save the game developpers a lot of hassle. It seems quite a few game frameworks don't support 4 joysticks, XNA included. Worse, it was explained XNA only supports native XBox controllers or keyboards, and nothing else. Not a show stopper since your basic arcade controllers map to keyboard keys anyway.

• Mini-PAC Standard with wire harness.
• Extra wire harness, for use with the old Keywiz controller.
• 1,2,3 and 4 player-start buttons.
• 1 extra green button, 4 extra orange buttons (spares)

This should take care of the controller issues. I ordered these from Ultimarc, the idea is eventually we'll have our controllers supplied directly from our good friend Raph at raphnet.net. 

Now, there are a few other internal components we'll need. First, there's the sound system. We'll need an amp and a pair of speakers to go with it. We'll aim for a good bang-for-buck here. The stereo parts will come from parts-express and the lighting will probably be home depot, unless I need to replace the marquee fixture. I'll need to order those later, I'm missing measures for the speakers.

• Stereo Amplifier
• Left and right speakers [still need to lookup proper size]
• Neon-marquee [or cold cathode?]

That's it for now. Next up we'll look into missing brackets (one for the marquee and one for the glass pane), the glass pane, and figure out how we'll secure the computer in the cab.

A simple way to have a central repository without the need of configuring a server or paying for such a service is to use Dropbox, if you trust it enough to put your source code in it.

The first step is to create the development git repository.

cd <source directory> (say ~/myproject)

git init

git add <whatever files you want to add> (repeat as needed)

git commit -m "first commit" (to put everything in the repository)

Now that you have the repository ready, you need to create one in your dropbox directory.  You can create a single directory to share or create a shared directory with multiple Git repositories.

cd <dropbox git directory> (say ~/Dropbox/mygitdir)

git init --bare (create a bare directory, for distribution, not for development)

 

cd ~/myproject

git remote add origin ~/Dropbox/mygitdir (links our project to the distribution repository)

git push origin master (push our source code to the distributed repository)

All you need to do is share you directory.  Your coworkers/helpers/friends can now clone the bare repository and start helping you...

No need to panic or forget about it because there another project to save the day : tesseract-android-tools.

To use it, simply download the stable release (or get the latest from SVN) and follow the simple instructions in the README file.  Basically, there is three project to gather and launch the ndk-build process.  The compiled library can be installed for future use or the project may be inserted in your Android with a simple "#include <path_of_tools>/tesseract-android-tools/jni/Android.mk".

Quite simple, tanks to "alanv" at g.com.

Here's a little trick I found on stackoverflow.com.

Instead of doing something like:

LOCAL_SRC_FILES := myfile.cpp theotherfile.cpp yetanotherfile.cpp (and so on...)

you can do something like that:

MY_PREFIX := $(MY_PATH)

MY_SOURCES := $(wildcard $(MY_PREFIX)/*.cpp)

LOCAL_SRC_FILES := $(MY_SOURCES:$(MY_PREFIX)%=%)