How to Copy a PICO-8 Game From a PocketCHIP

  • November 19, 2016
  • James Skemp
Having recently received my PocketCHIP I decided to start going through PICO-8 Zine #1 and its first tutorial. However, being the person I am, I hadn’t written too many lines before I started wondering how I could source control the games I work on on my new PocketCHIP. Since I’m using a MacBook Pro, here’s how I was able to copy my games off of my PocketCHIP and get them into git.

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Setting up a Raspberry Pi 2 Samba server (in early January 2016)

  • January 9, 2016
  • James Skemp
The following is how I configured a Raspberry Pi 2 as a samba server, using a Seagate Backup Plus Slim, 1TB, drive. For ease I purchased the CanaKit Raspberry Pi 2 Complete Starter Kit. It runs about $70 and includes enough to get up and running with the Raspberry Pi 2, with the Pi itself, a nice case, power supply, HDMI cable, WiFi adapter, and SD card with NOOBS/Raspbian installer.

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Google Services on the Amazon Fire HD 8

  • December 13, 2015
  • James Skemp
xda-developers has a post, Installing Google Framework/Playstore without Root (5th Gen Amazon Fire 2015), that includes a couple different sets of instructions. What worked for me was grabbing the mega.nz zip download and then: Make sure you're a developer and you allow apps from unknown sources. Install ES File Explorer via the Amazon Appstore. It's something I install on all my Android devices. Extract the contents of the zip you downloaded from Mega somewhere.

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Example libGDX orthographic camera controller

  • June 20, 2015
  • James Skemp
The following class can be used in a libGDX project as a framework for your own orthographic camera controller. This has been tested with libGDX 1.6.2, but should work in versions back to at least 1.4.x. View the code snippet on GitHub. OrthographicCameraController.java

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Configuring a libGDX project to run as a desktop application in Android Studio

  • March 13, 2015
  • James Skemp
The following will quickly cover how to setup a newly imported libGDX project to run a desktop application, via Android Studio 1.1.0. This assumes that you have already created a new libGDX project and have already imported it into Android Studio. If you have not, please review Creating your first libgdx project with Android Studio 1.1.0. With the project imported, select the configurations drop-down, or navigate to Run > Edit Configurations.

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Creating your first libGDX project with Android Studio 1.1.0

  • February 28, 2015
  • James Skemp
This is a quick 'tutorial' on how to get started with libGDX with Android Studio 1.1.0. Unfortunately while libGDX can be used with Android Studio 1.x, documentation regarding it is sparse. I'll assume that you have Android Studio 1.1.0 (1.x generally) installed and properly running. If you haven't already, download libgdx from the official site. The file name should be gdx-setup.jar, and will be run whenever you need to create a new project.

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Enabling ADB on a Lenovo A7600-F TAB A10

  • November 6, 2014
  • James Skemp
As of this post, Lenovo does not have an ADB Interface Driver for their Lenovo A7600-F TAB A10. However, since I'd like to develop on it, I had to find a solution. An initial forum post pointed me to the older ADB Interface Driver for their ThinkPad Tablet. However, trying to update the android_winusb.inf with the necessary information was throwing a signature error when I tried to install it on Windows 8.

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Rough guide on manually setting up Git on Windows

  • October 6, 2013
  • James Skemp
For both machines I'm doing this on (running Windows 7 and Windows 8) I had already installed Github for Windows. However, since I've been converted to posh-git, I wanted to do an install that would get me away from continuing to use it. The below is roughly what I did, and may not be completely correct. Install the latest version of msysgit (currently 1.8.4). Set execution policy (run as administrator).Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned Install posh-git(new-object Net.

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Converting from Subversion to Git on Windows

  • February 9, 2013
  • James Skemp
With the news that Visual Studio 2012 will support Git out-of-the-box, and me deciding to stop storing my repositories locally, I decided to switch to Git this weekend. They say the best way to do this is via svn2git, which unfortunately uses Ruby. Since I'm on Windows, and haven't done Ruby development, I needed to download Ruby using RubyInstaller for Windows. Next I needed to have RubyGems support, which meant downloading from RubyForge.

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Windows Phone 7: Taking and restoring a SQL database

  • April 22, 2012
  • James Skemp
As I develop my first Windows Phone 7 application, My Video Game Tracker, I want to make sure that the many games I've added won't accidentally be lost (as I'm deploying test versions to my physical phone). The below assumes you're using Windows PowerShell, but they should run on the standard command line. Taking screenshots of the application's data When you install the Windows Phone SDK the Isolated Storage Explorer Tool is also installed.

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