The Toy Box is where I write about all of the weird and wonderful hobby projects that I have created over the years. Some turned in to commercial products, others were just “how cool would it be?” ideas.

You can read about my experiments with M.A.M.E. and other emulators on various video game consoles, SenseCam software for my cell phone and desktop computer, games that never saw the light of day and even a few books that were almost published but the publisher decided at the last moment to back out.

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Added in the help screens. Click the question mark in the top right of each theme to view them. Swipe left and right to view each page. If you’re using the mouse, left click and drag left or right. Getting very close to release now! A few more features and some bug fixes and tweaks… Needing to read the rest of “Lucky Ace Slots update – 29th Jan – Help screens?” Click this!

I am currently working on an iOS game, developed in Unity, for release around the end of January on the iOS app store. iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 is the initial release target, and then an enhanced version for iPad and then on to Android. I thought I would show off the early beta release… Hankering to get the rest of “Lucky Ace Slots – My next iOS game?” Click on this link!

For the past six weeks I have been busily developing a new iOS game and getting it ready for a January launch. It is now at a state where I can start showing off some of the work that has taken place. The computers I work on are set up to take a snapshot of… Hankering to read the remainder of “Four weeks work in nine minutes?” Click this!

Hung out at AngelhackLA Hackathon on Dec 1st and 2nd. Found two guys who were looking to create a simple little iOS app, so we built a proof-of-concept. Here’s a capture of the work I did over the two days. The technology I used was NodeJS and socket.io as the stack, HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery… Continue reading the remainder of the article

A little over a month ago I interviewed with a small start-up company in Los Angeles doing some very cool work on a serious game for military and medical usage. Essentially it is an ultrasound simulation game that teaches medical personnel how to read an ultrasound image. This particular company had a unique twist on… Click here to read the remainder of this article

I have been tinkering around with the software I use for image feature extraction in my large collection of SenseCam images. Using OpenCV, a SURF algorithm and Python I have been able to create a small command-line application that can accurately determine places I have visited before based on the captured images. The Python script… Continue reading the rest of “SenseCam Image Recognition.”

This is a brief update to a previous article I posted about porting M.A.M.E. to the Microsoft XBOX. I have managed to remove just about all of the bugs in the rendering code. It’s even a little faster than it was before. I’ve fixed all the blown out colour & gamma problems and the sizing… Click to read the rest of “M.A.M.E. Emulator for Microsoft XBOX Update.”

Ahhhh! The GameBoy Advance. What a wonderful machine. So light! So refreshing! So versatile! Another Atari VCS 2600 emulator for the new Nintendo GameBoy Advance. I’ve been tinkering with this for well over 8 months and it’s now at a stage where I’m prepared to show it off. The emulator is written in pure assembly… Continue reading the rest of “Atari 2600 VCS Emulator for GBA.”

So some loony let me loose on a Microsoft XBOX development kit a month or two ago and I had some spare time on my hands this last weekend so it was only natural that I do something “creative”. M.A.M.E. for the XBOX is the result, and it was a lot easier to port to… Continue reading the rest of “M.A.M.E. Emulator for Microsoft XBOX.”

After successfully porting M.A.M.E. to the Sony PlayStation 2 I just had to try and port my generic Atari VCS 2600 emulator. The results are good. I’ve mapped the video display on to a cube that can be rotated around as you play. With VSync turned off the emulator runs at well over 300 frames… Continue reading the rest of “Atari 2600 VCS Emulator for SONY PlayStation 2.”