the nintendo ds is an awesome portipal gaming system. i have the ds lite, its thin, weights under a pound, has two super bright backlit screens, pretty sweet integrated speakers, the classic nintendo plus d-pad, four front buttons, and two sholder buttons. the bottom screen is touch sensitive, which makes for some awesome gameplay. the touch screen is sick, but a lot of people can be put off by it. so tons of games let your switch between the touch motion and d-pad motion. another thing i love about the ds lite is it's backwards compatable with gameboy advance. the new nintendo ds-i however is NOT backwards compatable, which i think is rediculious.

so the R4-DS is a revolution in homebrew/emulation/mod chip technology. the cart is what i like to call a "hack loader". basically during the normal boot sequence the data being read executes an exploit that allows the user to run any custom code they want. this affords many interesting possibilitys. for instance custom operating system and interface graphics, running homebrew applications, or running roms/archival copys of games. the official site is here. but i bought mine on amazon.

as yew can see, the r4-ds is the same size as a regular ds cartridge. the game shown is chrono trigger, which is a revamp of a classic super nintendo rpg, its one of my favorite games of all time. but the r4 has a tiny sd-micro slot on the back. the size of the sd card supported varies depending on which model of the r4 yew have. i have the r4-ds sd-hc version, which supports the maximum of 32 gigabytes. i suggest you get the sd-hc version, the R4-III only supports up to 2gb, which is a huge difference.

the main interface can be customized to look how ever you want. the developers of the r4 dont provide you with a tool to customize it with themeselves, but someone else has created a program called alice. its a freeware gui application that tells your all the necessarly file sizes and resolutions for each of the images, as well as help you create layover, transparency, and rollover effects for menus.

here's the theme i made for my r4-ds. i call it circuit board. download it here. the three buttons on the bottom left screen are the three main options of the r4. the first is ds emulations, this allows yew to play archival copies of games. the center icon is the media player moonshell. it can play mp3s and a custom ds video codec. the final option is to boot to slot-2 (gameboy advance slot). this however will not play regular gba games (you have to remove the r4 to do that) this option is for booting legacy gba hackloaders.

playback of emulated games is flawless! the speed, the sounds, the graphics, everything looks exactly the same. even games with multiplayer functionality work perfectly. whats great about the r4 is yew can grab an 0-day rom of a new game and check it out. if it sux, yew just delete the rom and forget about it. and if yew find out its awesome, then yew can buy the game and feel assured what its gonna be all about. i think if nintendo allowed yew to download demo roms directly to an sd card on the hardware to "try before yew buy" people would go crazy, and the ds scene would explode.

so now, yew might be asking...

 

"so xero, what can you play on this? and where can i get it???"

 

nectar by phlogiston – nectar is 2 EPs in one. part one, Croquel Adventure, continues in the chip-tune tradition of short, fun, pure NES songs. while part two, HEAT, transports you to an 80’s vision of the distant future. the album is a tour through a vast dystopian cityscape where high-tech low-life roam the streets. and the lines between man and machine have been washed out.

southbridge by nonfinite – southbridge combines triumphant melodies with though provoking harmony and infection head-rocking beats. like northbridge, each track has a unique feel to it. and will peak your interest to the last bleep! you can listen to the entire album online but it's not free. 25% of all proceeds will benefit "chip-in" a group of 8-bit people trying to help out.

future, and it doesn't work by starscream - in the not so distant future awaits the election of the first third party candidate to the white house- they will hail from the space party, a political coalition founded by astrophysicists, former democrats and ex-NASA employees. starscream tells a tale of victory, science, and potentially catastrophic foreign policy.

i have been wanting to make a metroid font for a long time now. NARPASSWORD00000 is made from the classic nintendo NES game metroid's password screen. the font also includes some dingbatz made from the games sprites. but i decided to go the extra mile and create the rest of the full international character set. the fonts name is a reference to a special backdoor password hidden in the game. click here to download.



my next new font is a capcom classic. ghouls ghosts and goblins made from sprites ripped directly from the NES rom chip. the game has had many incarnations over the years, like ghosts 'n goblins and ghouls 'n ghosts. so i named the font a combination of the two. this font contains the full set of A-Z, digits, special characters, and some 8bit dingbatz. click here to download.

my pal nonfinite has finally released his long-awaited album entitled northbridge. listening brings you right back to your childhood (or yer whole life in my case :P) sitting in front of the tv wasting the hours away playing video games an enjoying their repetitious bleep-bloop style beats. and nonfinite has his sounds on point! by using a homebrew gameboy cart called LSDJ he produces his new music on old hardware, giving him that pure old skool "chip tune" sound. grab your copy of the album here, FREE! nonfinite also does custom gameboy mods, check out his work here, or peruse his ebay auctions for gameboy mods and LDSJ carts!

after my last post about creating an actionscript project that extends the basic view, i got to thinking... my flex canvas3D is getting a bit outdated. these days i just make canvas then add my viewport3D or a basicView to it. so why not create a new UIcomponent that extends basicView? why not indeed...

introducing my new class, called CanvasView3D! this little flex gem makes setting up papervision3D in an MXML setting simple. by creating the CanvasView3D component, and initializing it to a local variable, you will automatically create a scene3D, camera3D, viewport3D, and a basicRenderEngine, all the core components of any PV3D application!

first things first, add a new xml namespace to your flex application
in this case, its going to be com.fontvirus.*

mxml code

<mx:Application
      xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
      xmlns:xx="com.fontvirus.*"
      layout="absolute"
      applicationComplete="init3D()">
</mx:Application>

mxml code

<xx:CanvasView3D id="paperCanvas" top="0" bottom="0" left="0" right="0"/>
 

mxml code

<xx:CanvasView3D autoScaleMode="true" interactivity="false" autoClipMode="true" autoCullMode="true"/>
 

actionscript 3 code

var view:BasicView = paperCanvas.view;

actionscript 3 code

var cam:Camera3D = paperCanvas.view.camera;
cam.zoom = 10;
cam.focus = 2;
var scene:Scene3D = paperCanvas.view.scene;
scene.addChild(new DisplyObject3D());
var viewport:ViewPort3D = paperCanvas.view.viewport.
var num = viewport.lastRenderList.length;
var renderer:BasicRenderEngine = paperCanvas.view.renderer;
render.renderScene(cam, scene, view);

or

actionscript 3 code

view.camera.zoom = 10;
view.camera.focus = 2;
view.scene.addChild(new DisplyObject3D());
var num = view.viewport.lastRenderList.length;
view.renderer.renderScene(view.camera, view.scene, view.viewport);
 

well the time is finally upon us, for all of you who aren’t avid mailing list readers, papervsion3D 2.0 alpha ((code name: great white)) has been released for testing. and the team bringing real-time 3D in flash has gone all out this release! this versions new features boast shaded materials, custom shaders, the new ascollada (now with animation support), frustrum culling, multiple viewports, rendering to scene, and more.. not to mention the average 26% gain in overall fps!

this weekend my wife nina was out of town, which means that i had some time to sit down and check out some of pv3D 2.0’s new features. i made a simple demo of creating a 3D scene in flex using MXML. The demo basically lets you switch between a few different 3D models, ((the first two are by mr.doob and the rest are by me)) and the material drawn on it. this demo features the new flat shaded, cell shaded, gouraud shaded, and phong shaded materials at your disposal in the new version. as usual models exported from 3D studio max to actionscript 3 with the help of the awesome as3 geom class exporter.

click here to check out the demo
and click here to view the source

the child of insomnia and fontlab. a few months ago i was having a rather lengthy battle with insomnia, so to help bide my time, i decided to make a font from scratch. i awoke the next morning on the couch with a discharged laptop, and forgot all about my fontography exploits. a month later i was looking in my font dev folder and found this. so i spent this weekend kerning, resizing letters, and making special characters to complete the font. the font contains a full set of A-Z capz only, digits, and most special characters.

click here to download

a new component for 3D studio max has arrived that allows you to export the geometry of you model directly into a format that actionscript 3 can understand. the plugin has options for exporting to papervision3d, away3d, and sandy. it was developed my dreammania.net and can be downloaded here. and exporting a model couldnt be easier.

step 1. create you model, and select it
(you can tell its selected because of the white bounding box)

step 2. open the utilities panel and select MaxScript

step 3. in the MaxScript window, select Run Script

step 4. select the as3GeomClassExporter.ms file,
then select it from the drop down

step 5. a new as3GeomClassExporter panel will appear. select you 3D engine, give your object a class name, and a package location (if necessary) then press the export class button to save it.


now using this object in papervision3D is a snap! just...

actionscript 3

import com.fontvirus.KnotAgain;
var theKnot:KnotAgain = new KnotAgain( skin );

a fellow papervsion3d enthusiast zeh (creator of the popular mctween) has created a new way of animating full 3d objects in the flash/flex environment with 100% code! Introducing the caurina tweener, witch is now hosted on googlecode, this re-envisioning of tweening is no longer a collection of h4x and prototypes extending existing ones. zeh has written full static classes following the idea of simple, one line commands. tweener is still in development, but is completely stable and functional.

check out the sound visualization demo i created using pv3d and tweener
http://the.fontvir.us/pv3d/spikey/
and its source code
http://the.fontvir.us/pv3d/spikey/spikey.as

UPDATE!

today john grden of rockonflash.com has release his new papervision3D component. this plugin for the flash cs3 ide allows you to...

- render and edit your 3d objects in Flash IDE at design time!
- it supports 3 material types
- you can creates movieScene3D and free or target cameras
- management of resizing / centering of a papervision3D scene
- dynamic masking to constrain the viewable area to set bounds
- full api and access to scene, camera, and collada objects to code around
- automatically loads materials via collada file
- new custom panel for modifying rotation, camera zoom, camera focus, camera Z

john has really outdone himself this time. this takes alot of the tedium of testing and retesting your 3D scenes to make sure the objects are positioned correctly.

- download the component here

watch the rmi training videos
- for developers
- for designers
- source files for training videos

woohoo! graffonti is #2 on dafont.com's top 100 font list! if yew don't know, dafont is the best free font site on the net. indexing 1000's of designers and font foundries. So to be font #2 is a pretty big honor! thanx everyone!

so i finally got a copy of adobe cs3 and flex builder2. flex is amazing, combining mxml and actionscript 3 together into a seamless package. now that im on the as3 tip, i decided to dive into papervision3D. pv3d is a set of actionscript classes that are used to create 3D objects within the flash environment. Currently in beta, the source code is only available to osflash emailing list members. so if yew want it... signup here. i have also posted my first flex as3 pv3d project, the metroid speedrun 3D cube. and here's the source. Thanx to carlos for creating pv3d and thanx to luis for the video texture tutorial.

i just found this zip on wiinintendo.net. some one made a flawless wiimote in 3D studio max. grab a copy and throw it into papervision3d!

as i have been checking out the new features of actionscript 3 and flex, i stumbled upon fwiidom.org. this site is run by joa ebert + thibault imbert, and their mission is full flash wiimote integration.

currently wiiflash supports multiple wiimotes and nunchuks, the classic controller, as well as pc sensor bars. all you need is a bluetooth enabled pc (or adaptor) and a wiimote.

the newest version is available from wiiflash or googlecode or you could get on the mailing list

the time is has finally come. my new font site is online. i have meticulously updated all my older fonts, and reinvented my type foundry. i currently have 21 fontz fer download. type|size=0 is dead. long live the fontvir.us!

         00XXXX                        XXXX00        
         00XXxx                        xxXX00        
         ee0000eeeeRR            RReeee0000ee        
               xxXX00            00XXxx              
               XXXX00            00XXXX              
         eexxXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxxee        
         00XXXXeeee00XXXXXXXXXXXX00eeeeXXXX00        
     xxXXXXXXXX    00XXXXXXXXXXXX00    XXXXXXXXxx    
     XXXXXXXXXX    00XXXXXXXXXXXX00    XXXXXXXXXX    
 eeeeXXXXXXXXXXeeeeRRXXXXXXXXXXXXRReeeeXXXXXXXXXXeeee
 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
 XXXX""""RRXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXRR""""XXXX
 XXXX    00XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX00    XXXX
 XXXX    00XXXX""""""""""""""""""""""""XXXX00    XXXX
 XXRR    00XXXX                        XXXX00    RRXX
 eeXX    00xxxxRR000000ee    ee000000RRxxxx00    XXee
               xxXXXXXXxx    xxXXXXXXxx              
               XXXXXXXXXX    XXXXXXXXXX              
          
  _____             __        .__
_/ ____\___   _____/  |____  _|__|______  __ __ ______
\   __Y  _ \ /    \   __\  \/ /  \_  __ \|  |  Y  ___/
 |  |(  <_> )   |  \  |  \   /|  ||  | \/|  |  |___ \
 |__| \____/|___|  /__|   \_/ |__||__|  /\____/____  >
                 \/                     \/         \/

this little freeware gem will keep yew occupied for hours. the game combines fluid dynamics with classic 80's nostalgia for and awesome game. and did i mention that it was free? grab a copy for pc or mac at plasmapong.com.