So, on Friday, Lone Star Game Fest IV had its Friday night game show. This usually involves a great deal of work and not all that much sleep for me, since the game show is my responsibility. The game show format for this year was "Duel".
We wanted to increase the geek aspect just a bit, so this year we built custom hardware. We wanted to actually be able to put a chip in a slot and have it light up and have the appropriate response in the software, etc. For the most part, we succeeded.
(Pictures of the hardware as it was being constructed are at my facebook profile. Screenshots will follow once I have an opportunity to take them -- the system is still disassembled.)Here's basically how the boxes are designed. Two boards of melanine each had four 1.75 inch holes cut, with oval "wings" on each side for lighting. Those were painted glossy red and glossy blue. We bought translucent lighting panel from Home Depot, cut it to size and attached some to each board. Meanwhile, we built simple wooden boxes and used the same paint. Inside the wooden box, we placed a white photo storage box (reflects light better) and inserted dividers between each.
As to the hardware...
Getting something to light up when a circuit is completed is easy enough. Getting something to stop lighting up is also easy. Having game show software play nice at the same time... that was a little trickier.
Ultimarc is a company a few of you may be familiar with, due to their niche market for arcade game controls for home market uses. They also have a series of clever logic boards, and one of their most recent is the U-HID. The U-HID basically is a board with 50 pins, where any of these pins can serve any of the following functions:
- Joystick movements and button presses
- Mouse clicks
- Keyboard strikes
- +5 Volt (useful for turning on 5V LEDs)
- LED Switch (send 5 volts only when another switch is completed)
- Ground
One of the two pins in any pair must be ground. The other can be any of the other functions. Complete a circuit between those two pins, and magic happens.
So I have a pair of pins tied to two keystrokes, and another as an LED switch tied to the first pair. When the first pair is jumped, the lights attached to the LED switch turn on, and a keystroke is sent to register the chip placement in the software. When it is unjumped, the keystroke is sent to register a chip removal.
Now, back the the lighting surface. I created logos to put in each chip slot using clear Avery labels. We then punched through each slot twice and ran wires that were attached to the programmed U-HID. We took coin insert poker chips, and placed them in the slot. That caused the circuit to be completed, which caused the aforementioned magic.
The way in which it sends keyboard strikes is pretty flexible. So I programmed it to send a normal repeated press when a chip is added, and a single pulse when a chip is removed. This meant that the LED stayed permanently on for as long as the chip was in the slot. Then we tied two LEDs together in parallel for each chip slot, and placed them both in a given divded area under the lighting surface, so both halves of a zone would be well lit.
Finally, we used a pair of arcade buttons to handle the lock-in and press.
Anyway, it works well, and the boxes look cool. I think I might go to photovoltaics in the next iteration, and I want to find a way to have different colors of lights in each zone like the show. But that comes later.
Onto the app:
I wrote the app in Adobe Flash, as many of us are wanton to do in this situation. My first snafu came when
I discovered that Flash apps have hardcoded max resolution. No problem there, though, just shrink everything down, run everything full screen and let the zoom handle it.
The next problem was when you run Flash in Full Screen, it only runs on one monitor. I was running on four displays across two video cards (one screen for me, one for the audience, and two for the players. Flash no likey. I downloaded several different flash "wrappers" trial programs to see if they would help, and none of them solved the problem. Finally, to get around this issue, I used a free app called ncstart.
With ncstart, you run as a command line (or via a shortcut) the ncstart program with the name of another program you want to run as a parameter. You can also force a specific width, height, position, and hiding of borders. Use of those options meant I was able to give the illusion of a full-screen app by just running a borderless windowed app at 0,0. Worked beautifully, and I highly recommend it for anyone else who gets caught in a similar jam.
The app can be run at the following URL:
http://parliboy.com/Duel/Duel6.swfThe upper screens are intended for audience and emcee view, while the lower screens are intended for the two sides views. So what information updates on each of them varies.
Controls are as follows:
F1-F8 for the red chips
1-8 for the blue chips
Left and Right arrow to move back and forward in the questions
Down arrow to show the everyone all information (think "Screen Down")
Enter key to show the right answer and announce the winner. If you're right, you also get a chip added to your total.
(IE users, sorry your browser sucks and doesn't send function keys through properly.)The big white button in the upper-right portion enables and disables the keystrokes doing these things. This is so the text boxes for the team names can be updated.
The two boxes send the F1-F8 and 1-8 keystrokes so that the players can use the boxes appropriately.
I have included access to 48 questions. I want to save the rest for use in next year's game show.
Let me know what you think.
Part two of this post will come later -- will include details about the actual running of the game.
