I have known for a while now that there were hacks out there to let you run homebrew games for the Wii off of SD cards. What I had not realised was that, through this, it is possible to archive your Wii games on a USB hard drive (or memory stick) and run them from there.
Admittedly, to do this you have to mess around with your Wii a little (not in the screwdriver sense, but in the firmware sense) but the following page explains, step-by-step what you need to do to get it working. http://gwht.wikidot.com/usb-loader
I plucked up the courage to risk it tonight and after a bit of toing and froing from laptop to Wii with an SD card, I had installed and patched enough to run the Configurable USB Loader, and have stored a few of my games on a USB stick I had to hand.
The next step it to buy a more permanent device so that I can store my whole library of games...
Thursday 10 December 2009
Friday 20 November 2009
Multi-Media Role-Playing
I'm currently in the process of putting together a new Star Wars RPG campaign and this time I'm going to try going all technological.
A friend of mine (shout out to Martin) has taken to running combat on a computer screen to avoid the need for models and a clear space to use them. When I started the planning for my campaign I asked a few questions of my potential players, one was how to handle combat; When the results came in, the use of a computer screen was favourite. With this in mind, I was thinking I'd move a few feet from running the game in my dining room to the living room where I have a big TV to put my laptop into.
I then started thinking what a waste it would be to have the screen blank during the session whenever combat isn't happening, so I decided to try a multimedia approach.
Being Star Wars, I will have an opening crawl at the start of each adventure to introduce the story. I also hope to get some CG models of each of the characters so I can use them in short animations or graphics for display. I even hope to use the odd bit of programming to display computer consoles or keypads where passwords or similar are required.
A friend of mine (shout out to Martin) has taken to running combat on a computer screen to avoid the need for models and a clear space to use them. When I started the planning for my campaign I asked a few questions of my potential players, one was how to handle combat; When the results came in, the use of a computer screen was favourite. With this in mind, I was thinking I'd move a few feet from running the game in my dining room to the living room where I have a big TV to put my laptop into.
I then started thinking what a waste it would be to have the screen blank during the session whenever combat isn't happening, so I decided to try a multimedia approach.
Being Star Wars, I will have an opening crawl at the start of each adventure to introduce the story. I also hope to get some CG models of each of the characters so I can use them in short animations or graphics for display. I even hope to use the odd bit of programming to display computer consoles or keypads where passwords or similar are required.
Wednesday 18 November 2009
Tuesday 17 November 2009
BBC + Wii Finally!
After some time of waiting the BBC iPlayer channel for the Wii is finally here! Well, I say it's here, apparently it's due to arrive just after midnight tonight. It's been some time since this was announced so it will be nice to see how they spent the development time. Hopefully there will be the option to download programmes to an SD card for later viewing (but probably not).
in reference to: BBC and Nintendo launch new ‘BBC iPlayer’ as a Wii Channel - Nintendo - News (view on Google Sidewiki)Thursday 25 June 2009
Tuesday 23 June 2009
3 Word Reviews
I have quite a few interests and like to spend more time pursuing them that writing about them. However, I'd also like to share my experiences with others. To this end I have decided that I am going to start writing reviews on a number of things from board games and role-play products, to software and APIs. However, I have decided that each review will be exactly 3 words long (not including the name of what I am reviewing) this should allow me plenty of time to document all that I test.
Saturday 14 February 2009
Playing with Jazz
Last night I downloaded a copy of Rational Team Concert, having just heard about the Jazz project.
Having started it up I started to work through the tutorials and was, quite frankly, blown away by what it could do. I'm a big fan of Mylyn on eclipse and the way it can focus you on a single task at a time. Jazz (or Concert, not sure where the boundaries lie right now) seems to take the task oriented development and expand it well beyond the bounds of the coding. It integrates your task/bug tracking with your coding and testing, your commits are associated with the results of your automated tests all in a structured workflow. It also allows for planning your releases, iterations and working hours.
It can also be used to enforce your processes, though I have yet to see how to set it up, but a couple of examples are that a new developer's code will not be committed until it has been reviewed by a more experienced developer (and will create a task for the experienced developer with the code attached), or that code containing warnings cannot be committed.
To do all this, it provides it's own bug/task tracking system, project planning tools and a source control system. The tracking system and the project planning are quite straight forward, but the source control system is a little different to what I'm used to and I have yet to get my head around it. It is made up a streams, I think, and these streams can belong to individuals or teams. You work in your own stream, then when your are done, you integrate it into the team stream, on larger projects you then integrate that into another stream, and so on up.
Having started it up I started to work through the tutorials and was, quite frankly, blown away by what it could do. I'm a big fan of Mylyn on eclipse and the way it can focus you on a single task at a time. Jazz (or Concert, not sure where the boundaries lie right now) seems to take the task oriented development and expand it well beyond the bounds of the coding. It integrates your task/bug tracking with your coding and testing, your commits are associated with the results of your automated tests all in a structured workflow. It also allows for planning your releases, iterations and working hours.
It can also be used to enforce your processes, though I have yet to see how to set it up, but a couple of examples are that a new developer's code will not be committed until it has been reviewed by a more experienced developer (and will create a task for the experienced developer with the code attached), or that code containing warnings cannot be committed.
To do all this, it provides it's own bug/task tracking system, project planning tools and a source control system. The tracking system and the project planning are quite straight forward, but the source control system is a little different to what I'm used to and I have yet to get my head around it. It is made up a streams, I think, and these streams can belong to individuals or teams. You work in your own stream, then when your are done, you integrate it into the team stream, on larger projects you then integrate that into another stream, and so on up.
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