Gaming and I go WAY back, all the way to Atari and Nintendo. I have so many games from my childhood that I still play and one of my biggest complaints with emulators is their lack of a quality user experience. For example, why don't emulators maintain a database which can retrieve game reviews and descriptions from web sources as well as allow you to rate games and add notes? Of all the emulators I tried UberNES, was the closest to offering this functionality. Unfortunately, of the games I tried only a few had descriptions, box-art, or screenshots.

So I decided to create an application I call, NES-Loader which adds all this meta data from an online scraper. You can see from the screenshots below, the application interface. The application starts up and all the games are listed with details like the developer, the year it was released, its genre and whether it is a "recommended" title or not. This is really helpful for sorting the list by genre (e.g. I only want toplay shooter games today) or the developer (such as Konami).

You can see below the NSIS installer which I used to package everything up into a single installer so I can install everything I need on any of my machines with just a few clicks.

As it stands now, this package contains all my games (which I own the originals for as well; I am a collector :)) so I cannot release it to the public but I will work on creating a generic application that anyone can use for their own games.

  In what could be one of the coolest projects a company could undertake, DirecTV has now offering a program called DirecTV2pc which allows you to watch all the recordings from all of your DVR units on your PCs.  

In order to get it up and running you have to download the tester application to determine if your machine meets the minumum requirement to run the client. When I ran it against my tower, the application indicated that I could not run the application since my monitor is connected via DVI and my monitor doesn't support HDCP (the copy protection scheme). I continued anyway and it works perfectly so far. This is almost as good as my old hacked Series 2 DirecTivo, which I hacked only to be able to stream my recordings and increase the hard disk capacity. 

  Utterly and completely frustrated with my Disk Stakka units I have finally decided to smash them with a hammer and build my own solution. What I have come up with is a little program I call CD-Beaver and its working out great for me. Refer to my code-project article for additional details and the source code.

 I an amazing show of love and affection, a relative purchased an Amazon Kindle 2 for my birthday and I must admit, it is amazing.  

 After learning to use the device and reading a few books, one of the features that really jumps out at me is the ability to take notes, bookmark, and highlight passages in books. I immediately started to make highlights of great quotes and passages and I got to thinking about how I could share these quotes and passages online with friends. 

This morning I developed a quick Web Service to serve up quotes to anyone who wants them. Whats great about the system is that it can be consumed by anyone's appliction or read directly from the internet. I have not decided on a front end for the system; whether I'm going to create a Web Site, desktop or facebook application, or a Vista sidebar gadget. 

So following my RRoD experience a few weeks ago I have been testing other avenues for gaming such as PC gaming. I have been playing console games since I was a toddler clutching onto my Atari 2600 paddle and I just can't get the hang of a mouse and keyboard to play games with. I have a Quad-Core Alienware desktop pc that I use for work that I decided to try. Even though the Games For Windows platform is suppossed to support the X360 controller out of the box, it doesn't. I was pissed after loosing more than an hour trying to get Call Of Duty: World At War to work with the controller; it doesn't. Insterad I investigated anther avenue that works with every PC game. 

Steps To Get The Wireless X360 Controller to Work for All PC Games (not just Games For Windows)

1. Get the XBOX360 Accessories Kit Wireless Gaming Receiver
2. Download Vista Compatible Drivers For the Accessories Kit
3. Synch the Controller to the receiver
4. Download & install the Pinnacle Game Profiler
5. Download the pre-configured game profile for your game so you don't need to map the buttons manually to keys

For my case, there wasn't a World at War profile yet so I used the Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare profile and it works great. I'm amazed at how fantastic PC games look at 1680x1050 resolution! Wow. 

I have defied the odds for so long considering that I had an original launch XBOX360 console from 2005 that was still working perfectly and has been used exhaustively this entire time (about 20 hours per week). Last week I started to experience a strange problem while playing Dead Space. In the middle of the 7th level when I entered a certain corridor the screen went jumbled and all the colors appeared malformed. After rebooting several times and getting the same result each time I put in a Fallout 3 and after the opening cinematic the screen went black. The lights were still green and everything looked like it was working except there was no visual. After the next reboot, Red Ring of Death. Since then I have allowed the system to sit several hours and it will boot up but after 5 minutes or so it will go black and RRoD after any reboots.

It looks to be a heat issue and I'm pretty certain I could hack at it for a few days and resolve the heat issues, if the components aren't burnt up. I decided to set it aside for the time being and dust off the Playstation 3 and use that instead for a few months until I decide whether or not to bother repairing the X360. 

For the last 2 weeks in my spare time I have been working on a desktop recipe management system which can be used to synchronize with the web system. My wife spends hours each month browsing our recipes and creating ingredient shopping lists and monthly menus. The kitchen kiosk web site is great for ogranizing recipes and sharing them with friends but it lacks that great user experience that can only be accomplished with desktop applications. The Alpha is completed and I hope to be in beta in a few weeks. When it's in a stable beta I will post it on nealosis.com

 Ok, so I occassionally watch a video game show on G4TV called XPlay and they run a segment called The Will Wright Minute. Will Wright, of course, is the legendary game designer who created Sim City and The Sims. In any event the XPlay folks have created a very clever opening song to introduce Will Wrights segment and as soon as I heard it; I wanted it as a ringtone! Watch the embedded video below (the beginning) to see what I'm talking about.  

Last weekend I found myself needing to rename some files on one of my servers. Ok, more like thousands of files because they were not named in a way that was conducive with XBMC's media information scraping features. When I looked at the sheer volume of files needing to be renamed I decided to write a small utility to rename the files in batch based on standard string replacements or Regular Expressions. 

For more details on the program or to get the code go to my code-project article on it. 

For quite some time I have had a pretty decent DVD movie server running at the house. It consists of a File Server (Buffalo TeraStation 2TB), which is used to store raw DVD rips, a X3 chipped XBOX running XBOX Media Center, and a 52" Plasma television. One of the most impressive features of XBMC is it's scraping capability, or the ability to fetch information from websites for you and import it into your media center library such as plot summaries, movie reviews, cast, year, genre, etc, etc. With the latest SVN builds of XBMC I have begun to notice that the scraper is acting strange. I guess most people use this kind of setup to watch pirated movies, but in my case I'm using raw DVD rips from DVDs I own. As such my file structure is a bit different. For example the movie 310 To Yuma is in a folder named 310 to Yuma and inside that folder are the traditional VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. Whenever I launch the IMDB scraper it searches for VIDEO_TS instead of 310 To Yuma since VIDEO_TS is a sub folder. To quickly resolve the issue I wrote a simple C# console application to do this:

1. Enumerate the Movies Share
2. For each folder move the files in VIDEO_TS into the root folder for the movie
3. Delete the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders

The script took 5 minutes to write and it saved hours of time of having to do this manually.