GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

Since last time I wrote in, I have been extremely busy preparing for Texas Pinball Fest 2016 -- tried to get four machines ready, then three, and then... oh well... only the two I had working to begin with were actually working by showtime.  Meanwhile, I had started to investigate a couple other projects, but never got something going nice enough to warrant writing a blog post on. Now that Texas Pinball Fest is over, and I swear my games are acting like rabbits (if you know what I mean ;), I'm trying to step back and work on some of the projects I had going before this massive push to restore a bunch of pinball machines happened.  However, I have another great big push for this weekend to get prepared for the North Dallas Area Retrocomputing meetup.  I've had vintage computers hanging around me since they were new, but have acquired some "new" stuff since around Thanksgiving (especially from Fred's "Warehouse of Wonder"), and need to get all the new ac...

In my quest to get certified to use the MultiCam CNC router table at the local Makerspace, I need to create some kind of part that requires use of at least a couple different types of end mills, plus do various cuts such as pockets, profiles, V-carves, engraving, and so on. First, a bit about the Makerspace movement, in case you haven’t heard: Makerspaces (or Hackerspaces) are places set up for community good that allow people to share knowledge, resources, and tools to help further DIY activities such as programming, electronics, 3D printing, machining, or other activities where people make something.  Makerspaces come in various flavors: some are set up as startup incubators, others as for-profit centers where paid employees build things for people, and still others where members mostly come to work on something completely different from work.  The tools one would find at a makerspace were traditionally owned by companies or by individuals who have spent a long time ho...

Are you looking to make a program that requires a bunch of interrupts using an ATmega328 or ATmega168 chip (such as on the Arduino Uno, Nano, or Mini platforms)?  If so, you may have been disappointed by the  basic documentation  you can find on this matter, and tempted to buy a more advanced Arduino such as the Mega2560, Zero, or even Due.  But have you seen how much their chips  cost  on Mouser?  If you're looking to do a small run of boards with what you ultimately produce, you will be taken aback to find that ATmega2560-16AU chips cost over 5x more than ATmega168A-AU chips!  In fact, I just recently bought an Arduino Mega2560 for less than what you can buy its chip for.  Having seen this, I knew there had to be a better way to leverage a cheaper chip. The Problem, In Short I need an application that can read from multiple sensor inputs, each of which will pulse with a high-frequency square wave (i.e.  toggle on & off ve...

Recently, I’ve acquired a bunch of vintage computer hardware from various sources, whether donated to me personally or stumbled upon during scavenger hunts through crazy places that used to be companies whose owners have pretty much turned into hoarders.  It’s been quite a tedious process getting some of these things working, but surprisingly, there have been very few instances lately where my skills with a soldering iron or my cache of loose parts has actually come in handy to fix something.  In fact, most things have come back to life surprisingly by simply plugging them in and giving them some time. Cases 1 & 2: Some Commodore 64 Computers Last week, a kind fellow who was moving granted me three Commodore 64 computers belonging to him and his brothers.  They grew up with these machines, and had a large collection of games and utilities on floppy disk.  There were also accessories such as floppy disk drives, joysticks, plenty of power supplies ...

Those of you looking to test AngularJS apps may have particular use cases where multiple instances of the page need to be opened to simulate multiple instances of an application running.  Say you have a chat client, and you wish to simulate multiple users on different instances of the application.  Or, perhaps you want to run two separate windows so that one represents a user interacting with a service and the other represents an admin panel watching over the user.  No matter what your use case is, Protractor makes this easy.  Protractor is an end-to-end testing framework for Angular applications that integrates with the Selenium WebDriver for powerful browser automation and ties in tightly with Angular internals for very powerful testing possibilities. A Simple Case: More of the Same Current versions of Protractor as of this writing easily support the ability to add more browser instances of the type you defined in your configuration file's capabilities secti...

Those of you who have ever been curious about making your own font should know that doing so on the computer isn't easy.  Sure there are several good programs out there that can help you take your design and digitize it, but a well-made font has been crafted with much care and attention to detail by a computer scientist just as much as a designer.  Some considerations that need to be made on the technical side include, for instance, how to "hint" rendering at very large or small sizes, accounting for grayscale devices in such hinting, making characters by compositing glyphs to save on file size (e.g.  fi  = f + i), and dealing with different platforms and character encodings across different computer systems so the font can be portable across Windows, Mac, and others. Now, think back to one of my long-time projects that relates to displaying text and images.  Yes, BriteBlox can certainly be capable of displaying messages set with TrueType fonts, and thi...