Next, speaking of Twitter, some website news. I’ve cleaned some clutter off the front page a bit, and added a Twitter feed as well. I’m pretty active with my tweets these days, so I figured it would be nice to carry that over onto the website.

Thanks again everyone!

The Synthetic Dreams Spooktacular Giveaway!

First, the prize: we’ll be giving away a free PSX64 Interface, along with a copy of Shredz64 to the lucky winner. Additionally, we’ll be donating $50.00 to one of the charities below – to which is by choice of the winner.

Heart to Heart International – Disaster Response and Medical Aid
Global Links – Medical Aid and Health Education
Vitamin Angels – Nutrients for Infants and Children
Books for Africa – Literature and Education for Africa

Not only do you get to rock out to your favorite SID tunes Guitar Hero style and reinvigorate your old C64, Amiga, and Atari games with a Playstation controller – but you also get to help out those less fortunate who could really use a hand.

The Rules

The rules are simple! Follow me, @ToniWestbrook, on Twitter between now and Halloween (October 31st). Once you’re following me, send me a tweet saying you’d like to participate in the contest – and your name will be entered into the drawing! (And I’ll follow you back!)

You can even double your chances to win – after tweeting the above to me, if you then tweet to all your followers:

“RT: @ToniWestbrook Win a free PSX64 to play Guitar Hero on your Commodore 64 while helping those in need! Details: http://bit.ly/cK1YKF”

You’ll be entered twice!

Keep following along, and at midnight (EST) at October 31st, the winner will be announced.

More on the Charities

There are a lot of future scientists, doctors, and engineers waiting to soar, but they may never get the chance without food, medicine, or education. This blog, and Synthetic Dreams as a whole, is about letting people achieve their dreams – but before you can do that, you need your basic needs met – and sometimes you need a helping hand to meet them.

Each of the charities above has been verified with Charity Navigator.

Good Luck Everyone!

@ToniWestbrook
http://www.twitter.com/ToniWestbrook

It means a lot that people are still very interested in this work, so I’ve started by making the following updates:

1. Updated the PSX64 firmware to fix a bug in macro recording, tighten up the analog joystick response, and increase sensitivity for precision game play when a non-Guitar controller is plugged in.
2. Updated the Shredz64 webpage with a downloadable bonus track, the Stairway to Heaven Intro, by Nantco Bakker. This track appeared on very early versions of Shredz64, but was replaced with Edwin’s Dream. Now both tracks can be enjoyed.
3. Since shipping varies wildly, and I tend to make boards as the need arises, I replaced the Paypal button on the order page with a link to the contact page. If you’re interested in ordering a PSX64, simply contact me with your shipping address, and I’ll quote you out the total price.

Thanks for your support everyone!

Also, speaking of the new game – its coming along pretty nicely! More on that later.

I’ve also installed a better code viewer on the blog, and have converted (I believe) all the code segments over to use this. It’s a little easier to read, shows line numbers, and also has buttons for viewing the code in a popup window (plain text, easy for reading/copying), and printing. I think it will work out a lot better than the old one – I wasn’t a fan.

Additionally, I’ve created a “Blackberry” category, since there are multiple articles related to programming the Blackberry now available on the site.

Lastly, I hope to see all you North East gamers at this year’s Digital Overload LAN party. If you haven’t signed up, registration is still open for 12 more days. I’ve been going for a few years, and it’s always a ton of fun!

In the meantime, for you text adventure fans like myself, check out this absolutely awesome video featuring MC Frontalot , nerdcore rapper extraordinaire (And guest appearance by Steve Meretsky!). I figured it was most appropriate with all the Gruepal work going on.

By the end of the week I should have two things ready to go -

1. Gruepal is up and running on another (faster) server. It’s shared webspace but the processor is a hell of a lot faster. If you are interested in helping test out some interactive fiction, shoot me a comment/message and I’ll send you back a username and password for when the site is ready.

2. I’m going to be adding some Paypal cart functionality to purchase a PSX64 on the Synthetic Dreams site. After sales at the TPUG convention, I have about 15 in stock. Once those 15 go I’ll make another batch.

Plus some other random goodness. Hope everyone had a good holiday!

Visuals

I made the margins slightly larger and made the text a big larger as well – it’s not a huge difference, but it does make reading articles a little easier. Alongside getting rid of the large left-hand ad last week, I think this has helped a lot.

Recent Posts

I also redid the recent posts list a bit. It used to list 3 over in the side bar – now it lists 5 on the main page, with an easy link that gives an abbreviated view of all posts, paginated. This also allowed me to move categories up in the side bar and organize them a bit better.

Feel free to shoot me a note if there’s anything else you’d like to see on the site. Thanks!