The Toy Box is where I write about all of the weird and wonderful hobby projects that I have created over the years. Some turned in to commercial products, others were just “how cool would it be?” ideas.

You can read about my experiments with M.A.M.E. and other emulators on various video game consoles, SenseCam software for my cell phone and desktop computer, games that never saw the light of day and even a few books that were almost published but the publisher decided at the last moment to back out.

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As I’ve just started working on PlayStation 2 hardware and I have access to a DTL-T10000 development station (the big black monolith) I wanted to find out just how fast the main CPU, an Hitachi clone of a MIPS processor, really was.I took the source code to M.A.M.E. and xMAME and with a little tweaking… Click this link to continue reading the rest of the post

Shortly after my time at Activision one of the things I tinkered with, inspired by working on the Pitfall franchise, were several tools to create, edit and manage levels for Pitfall 2 which I was hoping would be Pitfall II on the Nintendo Gameboy Colour. Pitfall II for GBC never happened (actually it did happen… Continue reading the rest of “Pitfall II+.”

This is a Gameboy emulator that I threw together over the period of about seven days. It’s been sitting around on my computer for a few weeks and I thought I should finally release it. Let’s optimistically refer to it as an “alpha” release. It’s not particularly robust or speedy right now. There’s still a… Craving to read the rest of “Otaku No Yen?” Use this link!

This was another attempt to get a programming book published. I originally pitched this idea by cold calling the chief submissions editor at a major publisher directly and had “Yes” in less than 4 minutes and a preliminary contract in my e-mail inbox inside of 20 minutes.After giving the contract due consideration I didn’t feel… Continue reading the remainder of the post