In the Vale
It's really weird to have a breakthrough in a dream. Not just "I let my mind mull it over, and knew the answer when I woke up"; I specifically remember the part of the dream during which I had the breakthrough, and why I had the breakthrough, and - most importantly - what the breakthrough was.
See, I've had a project in my head since Christmas. Alex loves playing old Nintendo games - Mega Man in particular is right up his alley - but he has a lot of trouble figuring out the keyboard controls for an emulator. So I've been thinking about reworking an original Nintendo controller so that it was essentially a self-contained emulator, but I've been having problems with the logistics. In particular, how do you get the system to just go to the emulator?
The dream involved a government search of a private school to determine which teacher had helped a student steal a professional music video for a school project, and featured scenes like Penn Jillette (playing the part of a government agent) interviewing Susan Wise (one of the classics professors at Earlham), and Wallace Shawn (playing a teacher), Mary Lacey (an English professor), and Bob Southard (a history professor) building a concealed microphone out of an alarm clock and an electric typewriter so that they could listen in on Shawn's conversation with the Feds, and it was during this last scene that the answer hit me. (I'm still not sure why.)
See, I've been thinking of this project as requiring Windows - but it doesn't. The emulator I prefer is actually a DOS program! Which almost certainly means that I can just put a rudimentary DOS, the emulator, and all of the ROMs on a "thumb drive" - one of the keychain-style flash-memory drives - and set AUTOEXEC.BAT to just load the emulator when the system starts up.
Now I just have to figure out the hardware aspect. It might be easier to work with a NES Advantage, thinking about it, than a standard controller; I don't know how much room the control board takes up, but it can't take up that much more room in an Advantage, which is several times the size...
(Before you comment: there are almost certainly existing controller-to-game-player ports out there. I'm not really that interested in hearing about them; I'd like to figure this out myself.)
See, I've had a project in my head since Christmas. Alex loves playing old Nintendo games - Mega Man in particular is right up his alley - but he has a lot of trouble figuring out the keyboard controls for an emulator. So I've been thinking about reworking an original Nintendo controller so that it was essentially a self-contained emulator, but I've been having problems with the logistics. In particular, how do you get the system to just go to the emulator?
The dream involved a government search of a private school to determine which teacher had helped a student steal a professional music video for a school project, and featured scenes like Penn Jillette (playing the part of a government agent) interviewing Susan Wise (one of the classics professors at Earlham), and Wallace Shawn (playing a teacher), Mary Lacey (an English professor), and Bob Southard (a history professor) building a concealed microphone out of an alarm clock and an electric typewriter so that they could listen in on Shawn's conversation with the Feds, and it was during this last scene that the answer hit me. (I'm still not sure why.)
See, I've been thinking of this project as requiring Windows - but it doesn't. The emulator I prefer is actually a DOS program! Which almost certainly means that I can just put a rudimentary DOS, the emulator, and all of the ROMs on a "thumb drive" - one of the keychain-style flash-memory drives - and set AUTOEXEC.BAT to just load the emulator when the system starts up.
Now I just have to figure out the hardware aspect. It might be easier to work with a NES Advantage, thinking about it, than a standard controller; I don't know how much room the control board takes up, but it can't take up that much more room in an Advantage, which is several times the size...
(Before you comment: there are almost certainly existing controller-to-game-player ports out there. I'm not really that interested in hearing about them; I'd like to figure this out myself.)