Planet Arduino

Our friends at Adafruit started releasing their yearly Holiday Gift Guides this week, and the Video Game Shield was featured in their Adafruit Holiday Gift Guide 2012 – Arduino Shields:

Wayne & Layne’s Video Game Shield Kit – The Video Game Shield is an Arduino add-on shield to make your own video games, including graphics, text, sound effects, and music! Using the power of open source, this Shield includes everything you need to make awesome black-and-white video games on your TV. It supports up to two Nintendo Wii Nunchuck controllers for an easy and familiar interface.

Read more: Adafruit Holiday Gift Guide 2012 – Arduino Shields

Every discussion forum on the web is only as good as its best members, and Wayne and Layne has been very fortunate to have forum member trodoss contributing to the W&L forum. In addition to being very quick to help answer other’s questions and helping us flag and remove spam posts, trodoss has contributed a couple of really cool games for the Video Game Shield. This is the second post highlighting the outstanding work trodoss has done in designing new games for the Video Game Shield. Yesterday we talked about the top-down adventure game (like the Legend of Zelda) Elventure.

Today’s game is called Poofy Adventure, and is a side-scrolling “platformer adventure game where Poofy gathers up fruit while avoiding snakes.” It’s been quite challenging (I haven’t gotten very far so far) and the use of realistic jumping physics is quite impressive!

You can download Poofy Adventure from the trodoss-arduino repository at Google Project Hosting. Here is the link to the latest Poofy Adventure code, you simply need to download the zip archive and unzip into a “poofy_adventure” folder in your Arduino sketchbook directory. We’ve incorporated the code into the Video Game Shield code archive on our download page and in the W&L Github repository.

Every discussion forum on the web is only as good as its best members, and Wayne and Layne has been very fortunate to have forum member trodoss contributing to the W&L forum. In addition to being very quick to help answer other’s questions and helping us flag and remove spam posts, trodoss has contributed a couple of really cool games for the Video Game Shield. We’ll be featuring these new games in some upcoming blog posts.

The first game is called Elventure, and is a top-down “adventure game where an intrepid elf explores the realm, gathering hidden treasure.” It’s really well done, and honestly we’re amazed at how much trodoss was able to do with such a simple platform. Remember how much better the graphics and gameplay were in Super Mario Bros. 3 compared to the original Super Mario Bros, despite running on the same exact hardware? This is sorta the same thing here, I never though we’d see a “Legend of Zelda” kind of game running on a lowly Arduino, so this is very exciting!

The game features an intrepid elf player character who journeys around the expansive map in search of gems, weapons, armor, and other items. The game has multiple types of enemies and different zone and tile textures, along with really fantastic music. There is even an overworld/underworld map you can download if you get stuck :- )

You can download Elventure from the trodoss-arduino repository at Google Project Hosting. Here is the link to the latest Elventure code, you simply need to download the zip archive and unzip into an “elventure” folder in your Arduino sketchbook directory. We’ve incorporated the code into the Video Game Shield code archive on our download page and in the W&L Github repository.

Just a quick update to let you all know that the code for the Video Game Shield has been updated to support knock-off Nunchucks! What does this mean? Well, for a long time the standard way of interfacing with the Nintendo Wii Nunchucks from an Arduino (using the I2C two-wire protocol) didn’t really work with the cheap knock-off (off-brand) Nunchucks for sale at places like Deal Extreme and Ebay. Fortunately, we recently stumbled upon some updated code that works with all Nunchucks, official as well as knock-off, so we’ve tested it out and updated the Video Game Shield code.

The new code can be found on our download page as well as the Video Game Shield repository at GitHub.

We are shopping around trying to find the best of the cheap knock-off Nunchucks, so look forward to us adding them to the Wayne & Layne store in the near future!