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Wolfenstein 3D on Gameboy Color

Wolfenstein 3D defined the FPS genre in a way no one could have predicted. Just like the Gameboy defined portable gaming in a way no one could have predicted. Cartridge based computing and gaming offered something that disk (or disc?) based media never could: additional hardware.

The most famous example of additional hardware is the “SuperFX” chip that debuted with the SNES game Starfox. (It was in used in others in addition to a successor.) Most NES cartridges had other hardware too: mappers, sound generators, additional ram, etc.

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Around The Web

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel

A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system

scrolling scale model of solar system

When I was growing up, I watched a lot of Star Trek. Over time I’ve looked into other Sci-Fi series. The occasional hit, like the reimaged Battlestar Galactica, caught my attention. But, for me, the voyages of the Enterprise defined “space” to me. Or the stories on Deep Space Nine. (There are no other Star Treks.)

Seeing a new alien or planet each week warps (see what I did there?) your mind to think that space is relatively small. But when you consider it takes almost 500 seconds for the light to travel from the Sun to the Earth, you begin to realize space is freaking huge.

That’s why this scrolling model of the solar system is so fantastic. It offers a unique sense of how “big” the universe really is–at least our solar system. Check it out on joshworth.com.

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Blog

Mooshimeter Review – Smartphone Multimeter

Mooshimeter Review

For fifteen years I used my Radio Shack 22-168A digital multimeter as my go-to meter. A couple of years ago I bought a Fluke 115. Not because the RS meter lacked a measurement, but because I wanted a backlit screen. Here’s the crazy thing though in 20 years of multimeter development, there hasn’t been much innovation. Well outside of maybe auto-ranging.

All three meters I have, plus the Virtual Bench I reviewed about a year ago all continue to have the same limitation: they can only perform one measurement at a time. That’s one feature that makes my latest meter, the Mooshimeter, unique. It can measure both voltage and current at the same time. Oh, and it doesn’t have a screen.

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Arduino

Fading LED: analogWrite millis() Example

Fading LED millis() Example

It’s a well-known fact of engineering: LEDs make everything look better. And that means a Fading LED is even better. Using Arduino’s analogWrite(), fading a LED is just a matter of a loop. If you use delay(), you can’t easily add other actions. What can you do? Well, Fading a LED with millis() is pretty simple. Here’s the code to do it and a quick explanation.

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