Toni Westbrook dot Com

The Joy of Computer Science and Engineering

Thanks to a few nice, quiet hours I had tonight, I was able to do some Shredz64 development. One thing I quickly noticed at the ECCC convention last month was that Shredz64 is too hard for new players. The timing is different from Guitar Hero, and is pretty demanding on top of that, so unless you’ve been playing for a while, it’s pretty hard. This was where it was nice to see other people using it, as its hard to judge the difficulty of something you’ve been playing for a year.

So to combat this issue, I’ve added the choice to play a track in either “Easy” or “Hard” mode when selecting the song by pressing green or red, respectively.

Selecting hard plays the track at the same difficulty as before, but selecting easy plays the track much more leniently - the notes are the same, but the note matching gives you an additional 10 pixels above and below what is considered a valid note hit in hard mode. This will hopefully make the game a little more approachable for new players coming from playing Guitar Hero.

Live Demo - TPUG’s World of Commodore Expo

Also - just a quick announcement, I will be demoing Shredz64 and the PSX64 interface, as well as selling a few PSX64s at the upcoming World of Commodore Expo hosted by TPUG in Toronto on December 6th. Even if you’re not interested in Shredz64, I urge you to check out WoC, they have quite a few demos, lots of tables with great Commodore stuff for sale, and knowledgeable and friendly people to talk to. Toronto is always a fun place to visit as well, so make a weekend of it! Hope to see you there!

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you’ll know that the prototypes had checked out and we were awaiting the final product. I’m happy to say we received a batch of 20 PCBs from the fab house the other day, and I’ve soldered one up, and it works great. That means that we’re good to go, it’s just a matter of us soldering them up and shipping them out! As soon as the first batch of 20 have been assembled, preregistration will close and normal sales will open. Those who preregistered will be given first priority to the purchase of a PSX64 and Shredz64. More instructions are to follow soon. After the first batch of 20 ship, more batches will come in 50 at a time. Please note, it will take a while to assemble each batch, but we will try to be timely so you won’t have to wait long.

Below is a picture of the finished product as you will receive it. Note - as you can see we changed the design slightly to use rectangular connectors which should add a lot of stress relief/protection to the cables.

When the first 20 are assembled, a final price will be posted as well. Thanks again for your continued patience, we’re definitely rolling along!

First off, I want to apologize for not updating this blog for a few weeks, I’ve started a new job and things have been hectic getting up to speed on things. But life is starting to calm down, and more importantly, I’ve received the first PSX64 PCB, soldered on the chips, uploaded the firmware, and it works!

There are a few changes to make to the board, mainly due to the pinout of available parts (I have a large stock of voltage regulators that are a different pinout than how the board is configured). I’m also going to use rectangular headers with stress relief connectors for the PSX and DB9 cables so they can take more tugging (as opposed to soldering them directly to the board). However, these changes aren’t major and don’t require another single-board run. The next run will be a batch of 10-30 boards, which will then be available for purchase! I suspect it will be about 4 weeks or so.

Thanks to everyone who has signed up on the notification list, it won’t be too much longer now!