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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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… Need to get the rest of “Ultrasound iPhone Device?” Click this!

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 this article

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… Craving to read the remainder of “M.A.M.E. Emulator for Microsoft XBOX Update?” Click here!

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… Looking to get the remainder of “Atari 2600 VCS Emulator for GBA?” Click this link!

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… Click to read the remainder of this post

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… Looking to read the rest of “Atari 2600 VCS Emulator for SONY PlayStation 2?” Click the link!

As I’ve just started working on PlayStation 2 hardware and I have access to a DTL-T10000 development station (the big black monolith) I wanted to find out just how fast the main CPU, an Hitachi clone of a MIPS processor, really was.I took the source code to M.A.M.E. and xMAME and with a little tweaking… Continue reading the rest of “M.A.M.E. for SONY PlayStation 2.”

Shortly after my time at Activision one of the things I tinkered with, inspired by working on the Pitfall franchise, were several tools to create, edit and manage levels for Pitfall 2 which I was hoping would be Pitfall II on the Nintendo Gameboy Colour. Pitfall II for GBC never happened (actually it did happen… Click here to continue reading the rest of “Pitfall II+.”

This is a Gameboy emulator that I threw together over the period of about seven days. It’s been sitting around on my computer for a few weeks and I thought I should finally release it. Let’s optimistically refer to it as an “alpha” release. It’s not particularly robust or speedy right now. There’s still a… Continue reading the remainder of “Otaku No Yen.”

This was another attempt to get a programming book published. I originally pitched this idea by cold calling the chief submissions editor at a major publisher directly and had “Yes” in less than 4 minutes and a preliminary contract in my e-mail inbox inside of 20 minutes.After giving the contract due consideration I didn’t feel… Continue reading the remainder of this post