Blog

Building a MAME Cabinet

I’ve been tossing the idea of building a MAME cabinet around in my head for a while and I’m getting close to decided whether to do it or not this summer. I’m hoping that with enough planning, it should be a smooth enough project for me to complete during the warm months here in Calgary.

MAME Cabinet Control Resources

Three interesting places I’ve found for purchasing arcade-quality controls:

Right now, I’m investigating various control-to-USB converters.

Happ Controls has the “USB Game Control Interface” for US$185. This interface can convert two 8-way joysticks, six buttons for each joystick, a three-button trackball, a couple of start select buttons and some coin counters. It looks like it would do everything I’m looking for, but the price is pretty steep.

Mozilla Firefox - Switch!

The Mozilla Firefox 0.8 release has been so popular that it’s making a number of the main download sites for the browser and extensions, such as ftp.mozilla.org and mozdev.org, extremely slow. As the Mozilla community grows, there’s going to be an ever-increasing need to have a solid infrastructure in place to support the increasing amount of traffic.

I’m impressed with the number of people that have started using this browser - people who I would have never expected to switch have done so. You never hear the words “this site doesn’t work in Firefox”.

Unit Testing Redux

I’ve been a big fan of unit testing for a while (ever since the first releases of JUnit) but I haven’t been up-to-date with the latest technology. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t expected anything else to appear after unit testing was first popularized. That’s why I was surprised to come across an off-hand reference to “Mock Objects” a few days back. Basically, Mock Objects are a true way to test an object “in a box” - ie: completely separate from the rest of your system.

Stereo Anaglyphs from Mars

I’ve had trouble with a lot of the stereo anaglyphs that NASA’s been publishing. Most of them seem to have a stereo separation that is completely incompatible with my brain. I finally found a few images that actually work with my red/blue glasses (from this page):

The trick is to tilt your head just right. If you find that you’re seeing a lot of shimmering, trying relaxing your eyes and focussing on infinity - it’ll be easier to find the correct head angle that way. Oh yeah - move the mouse pointer off too.