Projects

I’m a nerd and I’m proud of it.

Now that’s certainly no sercret, so in the spirit of Geek Pride, here are some of the more involved things that prevent me from being considered what some people might call “normal.”

Feel free to drop me a line with any questions or comments.

Movies and Visual Effects

I’ve loved making movies ever since I was a kid.  I would always try and convince my teachers to allow me to hand in video projects in lieu of traditional reports, and often, they would indulge my creative enthusiasm.  I was rather fortunate that our high school had a fully-functional closed-circuit television studio, and I was able to learn so much about video production.

A few years back, a few of my friends and I tried our hand at making some fun short movies that involved some sort of visual effects: lightsabers, mutant abilities, or some other type of absurdity.  These days, the technology is affordable enough that anyone can get rather impressive results on the cheap.  And so, armed with our digital camcorders and some off-the-shelf software, we spent the occasional weekend acting like complete idiots and embarrassing ourselves on the Internet.

If you’d like to see what we came up with, please visit Wingbuck Studios.

MAME Cabinet

Back in 2003 or so, I scored a sweet deal on an old beat-up arcade cabinet, in fully working condition. As I had an abundance of free time during my exile in Delaware, I decided to follow in the footsteps of many of my fellow nerds and slap a computer into it and get it to run MAME. I quickly realized that it was a project you never actually “finish”, and was constantly thinking of ways to add features and better hardware.

It got a lot of great use over the years, but as life got busy and I got into other hobbies, I found that I never used it, and it was just collecting dust. It was hardly used even when friends were over. Like most hobbies, 90% of the fun is working on it, and I hadn’t worked on it in about a year. I sold it in the fall of 2006, and rolled the money into a Home Theater PC, which is capable of playing all of the same games on my living room TV.

Cabinet Hardware:

• Cabinet: Dynamo Cut-Corner Jamma
• Monitor: 19″ WG K7602 Arcade Monitor
• PC: AMD Athlon 2600XP+ 2.4 GHz w/ 512 MB RAM
• Video Card: Ultimarc ArcadeVGA
• Encoder: Ultimarc J-Pac
• Joysticks: Ultimarc T-Stick Plus
• Buttons: Ultimarc Microswitch Pushbuttons – 7-Button Layout
• Trackball: X-Arcade Trackball
• Coin Mechs: Coin Controls US $0.25, HAPP Ultimech .984 Token

Cabinet Software:

• Frontend: MAMEWah
• MAME: v0.067
• Daphne: Dragon’s Lair Anniversary Collection DVDs