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FireTime

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About FireTime

  • Birthday 02/11/1989

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    Computer+killer6
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    FireTime@gmail.com
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    da UP

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  1. Well I finished my arcade a couple weeks ago and I'll post up everything I have about it so that It may help some others (or possibly get some input, a good project is never completely finished) I've been wanting to build an arcade for the past... forever. Something along the lines of 2 years ago I fired up the old computer laying in my basement and brought up to speed with a good cleaning, a few cheep computer components, and a a fresh install of windows 2000. I managed to get Mame32 up and running along with the required dependencies for a few games. A trick I found out was a registry hack for windows 2000. I found that you can remap the action to start explorer.exe when windows starts. So now when windows runs the command to start the window manager it instead starts mame32. After a few weeks of three dimensional spacial manipulation in BlockOut for a week I put the project in hibernation. During the next few years I would fire up AutoCAD every now and again to draw some lines, and tweak some distances. So not much happened for a few years until a few months ago the planets aligned and I had the opportunity to complete the project. Being the internet/technology chair of my fraternity I was able to present a motion at meeting for added (more than the current budget of $0) funding for "technological" expenses. This added funding was able to purchase the Joysticks/Buttons from xgaming.com, the skeet of polycarbonate to protect the screen from rowdy patrons, and some other small expenses. The week prior to this was our work weekend (a week where we do major house renovations, repairs, and additions) so there was an excess of plywood and 2x4 lumber available to me. Also around this time I was able to get a friend to laser cut me the the control deck out of a piece of stainless steel. This is good because everything about this arcade was designed to be beefy. Ok, enough with the back story (well, all of this project is back story now). I began cutting the 2x4 for the frame. This process only took me a few hours because I had created a part list (I would call it a BOM but all of the drafting people would make fun of me for calling that sorry excuse for a parts list a build of materials) So there's the plots from auto with all of my scribbling and adjustments on it. The more number inclined of you may notice that some of the fractional measurements arn't the same as there decimal counterparts. This is because I underestimated the width of the base of the joysticks and needed to increase the total width of the arcade so that the player 1 control stick would have room to fit in the front box. After I assembled and painted the thing with 8 cans of black spray I began work on the the controls. Because i'm cheep and moderately insane (also not bad with a soldering iron) I opted to not use a commercially available arcade encoder and just use one out of a keyboard. I had an old Dell keyboard (the tan colored one that 99% of high schools used before upgrading the the new sleek black ones) that I tore apart. After spending the better part of an afternoon mapping out the matrix (using a paper clip and a bit of wire), I was able to find the few important keys and some other safe keys that I could remap later. This was all fine and dandy until I found out that some one over at the dell keyboard design team messed up the matrix and grouped the first wire in the primary axsis with the other axsis. After pulling out a little hair I figured it out and wrote my self some fairly vague notes that I could puzzle over later when my mind was fried from all of the toxic fumes from my iron. Next was wiring the thing up. Top gear top tip, Find a comfortable chair and place the iron in a convenient location or else your arm, wrist and back will want to kill you for the next week. As you can see in the pic above I just needed to wire each button up between the two sides of the matrix. One thing that is VERY IMPORTANT for those of you who are wiring this way is to either design your matrix to be ghost free (difficult/impossible) or to use diodes. After every microswitch I placed a diode to prevent power from back feeding thru the system causing ghosting.Here is a GREAT guide on the hows and whys on ghosting and diodes. Yes that is christmas light wire. So after... 125-140 connections wired and 8 or so re-wires (see text above about me leaving vague notes) I had a working control deck. :D I crammed everything into the box and fired her up. Lo and behold I wired the joysticks backwards. I remembered to flip them because I was wiring it upside down but I forgot the when you push up the lower switch fires because the sticks pivot. So after a little help from randyrants I was back in business. I reconfigured Mame to the new buttons and BAM GAH it's hideious! Well the camera did make it look worse than it did then but that isn't the finished product. Since then I have skim coated the box to remove the chip board tecture and have placeda metal grid over the slots in the front. I'll post a better pic of the thing once I find my camera/finish up some detailing.
  2. svideo - yellow adapters are very common. I think I have two of em on my desk right now. This is the one I ordered from parts-express but your local radio shack should also carry a similar product.
  3. I guess I left out that the back light should be an IR CCFL. And I found that there are scanners out there there that can be told to only scan for IR. So you would only be scanning the IR that is penetrating the envelope.
  4. meah I prefer mowes. It's the lazy mans webserver. but what digip sez also applies to mowes because it's build on xampp
  5. I wonder if a scanner would work. If you could find a way to to back light it, instead of front lighting. I think that you could get better resolution with that. I found a little research that some scanning heads detect IR for use with artifact detection. So it may be possible to place an IR filter in front of the scanning head ant block out visible light just like the camera. --edit Apparently they make passport/ID scanners that already have this functionality built in.
  6. Playing around with UXtheme patcher on windows 7 and serious samurize. here is the login page I aligned the images so the photo fades thru black into the vectored one on my desktop.
  7. FireTime

    Tribes 2

    Tribes 2 was one of the most amazing games of all time. Well the core game was kinda boring, but the mapping and moding community is what made that game. Meltdown mod, and Quantum construction mod. I spend a good part of my life on that game. Was part of the tribes {TWD} total war dogs and [POW] prisoners of war. I haven't logged on in years tho and I doubt that there are too many servers apart from a few construction ones still up.
  8. I just finished my MAME arcade for my house and it's working awesome. The one this that is a pain is whenever I want to edit settings. As of now I have to connect a keyboard to enter settings editor but from there I can use the controls. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to passively scan for a sequence of key-presses and then return the proper key presses. example( enter the konami code and return a key press for tab or #5) --EDIT------- I've been doing some research and I think I will program this in python. I don't know python at all but pyHook looks fairly simple to use.
  9. I'll second what Deveant stated, What is your current drive, .
  10. k, everything you need to know about replacing your 360 drive. Use this knowledge to replace your drive or to repair it. Before you can do anything you need your drive key. Without it there is nothing you can do. There is NO way around this. If you misplace, or destroy your drive key you are SOL. The drive key is used to verify the integrity of the system to prevent piracy (kinda of, but close enough). Without the correct drive key the 360 cannot play game disks. DVD's and market place games do work tho. To get your drive key you need to connect your 360 drive to your computer. (i'm assuming that you have already done this based on your previous posts.) I found that DOSflasher was more compatible than MKflasher. Using DOSflasher read the firmware off of your drive and save it. Go into windows and use Firmware Toolbox to read your Drive key. SAVE IT SAVE IT SAVE IT. Put it on a flash drive as read only, burn it do a disk. Upload it to a server. Bury it. JUST DON'T LOSE IT. This key is worth the same as your xbox. If you cant read your drive make sure you're doing it right, there are bunch of tutorials around for that. If your drive controller board is dead and the nand (I think it is a nand...) is not damaged you can read it with a proper programmer. But the programmer costs more than a new 360 mobo with drive key. If you flashed your drive without first recovering/merging your drive key you are SOL. You now have a glorified DVD player. If you didn't kill you drive and you got the drive key your all set. You can buy a new drive (model dosent matter) and using Firmware Toolbox spoof the "vender ID" of the drive. For example my 360 has a Toshiba-Samsung ms25 in it but I replaced it with as ms28. (not compatible normally) I think thats everything. Because modding is a sore subject... DISCLAIMER! this information is only to be used in the recovery / repair / and replacement of damaged xbox360 drives. This is the only know way for end users to replace there 360 drive and it is microsofts own fault for disallowing consumers to replace there drive without the need for firmware flashing that is generally reserved for use in piracy.
  11. "I thought that was the sole reason Al Gore Invented the Internet"
  12. If you half to reapply thermal paste every month your doing something very wrong. Get some good thermal paste and apply it properly, it should be good for some time.
  13. "Dam cyrix preprocessors. You go with the lowest bidder and this is what happens." ~ Gordon Freeman
  14. I know that some states have FIOS, but if you do some research the government has and STILL IS giving the telecom industries HUGE tax brakes that was initially designed to do two things. First was to give reliable internet to everyone (specifically those in rural areas). Second is build up the fiber infrastructure so that every house in america could have fiber to there door step. Most companies have worked on increasing there core infrastructure but have failed on the two primary goals. Here is a link that covers some of the thing thats happening. (Little biased but still has good information. And no I don't own a tin foil hat.)
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