Alright I guess I’m back to designing shirts. My last one didn’t fare so well, but I’m hoping this one does better. The theme of the week is pixels. Everything has to be drawn in pixels, on a 64*80 grid. For some reason I had an idea to do arrows. This is how it all turned out:
Shirt Design
Shirt Comp
It’s a pretty simple, clean design. I don’t like how it ended up looking like I constrained the whole design to a box, but otherwise it looks pretty good.
Ever since I found out about shirt.woot.com, I’ve loved it. Shirts sell for $15 max, usually $10, and shipping is free! I’ve ordered one shirt off there so far. But wait, there’s more! They have a thing called a derby, a competition held once a week where users submit their ideas for a shirt that fulfills a predetermined theme for the week. I always take a look at the up and coming ideas to see what people come up with. There have been many creative ideas, but I haven’t been able to come up with my own idea until now. The theme this week is independence (in time for the 4th of July). I thought it would be cool to design a shirt with ascii art, so I opened notepad. Before I even typed a character in notepad, the backslash and forward slash (slanting lines) got me to thinking about dominoes, and the idea hit me. I would design a shirt with falling dominoes, except one of them wouldn’t fall. My idea ended up looking like this:
The idea is that the domino is free from Newton and gravity. I like the simplicity, but it may be too simple to win. I do think it looks good on a shirt, though =)
Anyways, if you would like to see this shirt in real life, please vote for it here.
Updating a previous post (where I mentioned doing a Google search), this picture speaks for itself:
=)
Like I said in my previous post, this is actually the first project I completed. I have some experience with a little Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) called FL Studio. It’s actually a pretty powerful tool, comparable to Photoshop except in the audio field. In FL Studio, you start with the raw sounds: a drum kick, snare, hi-hat, bells, claps, etc, and insert these sounds on a grid where a line sweeps through from left to right and plays each sound as it passes over. The result: a beat. Here is a very simple example:
I have actually worked with this program for awhile, learning the basics of beat manipulation, when I came across a feature called “piano roll” which looks similar the basic beat thing. A piano roll is an option available to any sound and it manipulates the pitch the sound makes. It works in a similar fashion, except on the left side, instead of different beats, you have different notes. You place little bars of variable width which change the length the note plays. As before, a line sweeps over and plays each note resulting in a melody. Every now and then in my free time I dabble, and every now and then, I end up creating a beat I really like, and develop into a full fledged song. The particular song I finished and will present to you today is one that I have started about a year ago, and messed around with on and off. I have tweaked every aspect and have finally run out of things to do with it. It is done, and has gone through about 7 or 8 revisions. I call it Video Game Hysteria, because the main part of the song, the melody, sounds like something out of a Mario game. I hope you enjoy it!
If you would like to see (hear) the evolution of this song, the other revisions have been uploaded to Video Game Hysteria
This is actually the second project I finished, but I was so excited about it, I decided to post it first. I recently tried to play a SNES game on my Wii using my Gamecube controller. I soon found out it was impossible. I’ll show you why.
Here’s a SNES controller:
and here’s a gamecube controller
Notice the placement of the Y button. This is crucial, because in platformers, namely Super Mario World, the Y button is run, and the B button is jump. How am I supposed to run and jump with the Gamecube controller?
I could’ve just gone out and bought a Classic controller to accommodate, but I figured I could just swap the buttons by rewiring one of my old Gamecube controllers. I set out on the internet to find a guide for this. I looked pretty shallowly (how do you look up something like this?) on google using a query like, “Gamecube controller button swap mod,” and found no relevant results. I thought to myself, “How hard could this be?”
I’ve opened one of my Gamecube controllers before (my wavebird), to see if I could fix a sticky L button, so opening another one would be no big deal. Inside I found that the entire circuit board was…well, unexposed. It looked like a thin film of white paint was covering the entire thing. So I scraped it off with a screwdriver.
I wasn’t kidding about the scraping. As you can see, I’ve already soldered a wire onto it, which I did in reverse actually, the way that is set up, the A button activates the X button. I’ll discuss more about that later. Anyways, you can kind of see how some parts of copper are shiny and some aren’t, because even after scraping the paint off, the copper parts were covered with a waxy like substance. I’m not sure what it was exactly (I’m no electrical engineer), but after scraping it off, it was shiny, meaning the copper is exposed, and eligible for soldering.
If you take a look at the pictures of the SNES and Gamecube (GC) controllers, you can see that the positioning of the buttons is rotated. That is…
On the GC controller, the…
B button is on the left, A on the bottom, X on right, and Y on top.
On the SNES controller, the…
Y button is on the left, B on the bottom, A on right, and X on top.
I lined up the sentences so you can see the parallels. So to make the the Gamecube controller act as a SNES, I just had to make the B button be the Y button, A button be B button, X be A, and Y be X. Here’s a diagram of my desired result:
The blue lines are where the wires are supposed to connect, the yellow lines are to highlight the copper wires, and the brown zigzag…ignore that. Also, each button is labeled, so I circled them to make sure you didn’t miss that. The A button wasn’t labeled ’cause I probably scraped it off, so I wrote it in. The green lines indicate where I would need to cut through the copper wire so pushing that button wouldn’t register it’s appropriate button press. In other words, the A button would no longer activate the A button. Time for more scraping…
I really wasn’t kidding about the scraping. This is pretty much the same picture as above, zoomed in on the part where i scraped through the copper wire, to deactivate the A button. After I did that, there was no turning back, I had to finish this project. I guess either way it wasn’t a big deal, this was one of my extra gamecube controllers, but I really wanted to play Super Mario World on my Wii.
The rest should’ve been easy, but I am terrible at soldering. I know the basics, put solder on the wire, put solder on the contact, blahblahblah, but for some reason, the solder never wants to stick. There’s probably more to it than that, maybe if an expert solderer reads my blog, he/she could give me a few tips. Anyways, I ended up almost ruining the entire thing when I burnt/scraped off an entire contact point right here:
I thought I would be savvy and solder on the circular points of the contacts, but like I said, I am terrible at soldering. So I ended up burning and/or scraping it off. All I remember was that it was there, and then it wasn’t. I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish the project, but before I gave up hope, I plugged in my controller, stuck the wire in that tiny hole, and touched a spot to complete the circuit and hopefully register a button press. Somehow it registered fine, but now I had the problem of keeping that wire in there. There is no way i could get any solder in that tiny hole (the diameter of the hole is about the same as the wire), so I resorted to tape. Electrical tape of course, even though I am not sure how why I used electrical tape over any other type. So I pushed the wire through the hole, taped it down so it wouldn’t move, and soldered the other end onto the appropriate contact. This turned out to be one of the more sturdier connections, which is kinda sad. Also, I decided to use completely stripped wires for the sake of space and flexibility. The rest of my problems were frustrating soldering issues, so I’ll skip straight to the ending…the sweet, sweet ending. Everything works =D despite my really bad soldering skills!
Here’s a picture of my final wiring job (horrendous):
I wasn’t kidding about being bad at soldering. There is solder on places that don’t need it, too much solder, too little solder causing weak/bad connections, and all sorts of other problems. By this time, though, I was ready to be done and thought as long as I play nice with my controller, these connections will stay intact. The other piece of electrical tape (the bottom one) is to prevent contact between wires. I have also uploaded a video to youtube to show my modded GC controller in all its glory:
So there you have it–possibly the world’s first Gamecube controller button swap mod, done specifically for playing SNES games on the Wii.
I’m easily entertained and I easily get bored. I made this blog to share with the world what I do to stay busy. I like to think I’m creative. I’m a sketch artist, guitarist, pianist, drummer, gamer, programmer, and now a writer. Why do I have so many hobbies? Like I said, I get bored easily. I’m also a student. I plan on majoring in computer engineering at UW. A lot of my projects (blog posts) will have to do with what I’ve said I can do. I just finished finals yesterday, but I’ve already had a pretty productive summer–I’ve already finished two projects. Consequently, these will be the first two things I post about.
