Standing on 16-bit shoulders
With my recent interest in HTML5 gaming I've started replaying some of the classic games from my childhood. The late 80's and early 90's was a golden era for gaming seeing several generations of consoles and home computers enter the market. From the industrious Commodore 64 and the classic NES to the much loved Sega Mega Drive.
Today these old systems have been superseded by more powerful consoles with bump-mapped textures and real-time shadows, but this doesn't apply to HTML5 games that use of the 2D <canvas> tag. Even on a quad-core Mac book pro, it can still be difficult to keep a steady 30fps with multiple sprites bouncing around the screen.
To learn performance and graphical tricks from the 16-bit masters I've gone back and started replaying classic games, but to do this I needed some help from an emulator and a controller adapter.
There are many emulators available for pretty much every device every made, but as I'm using Fedora Linux it was a little more involved. I own a Wii Classic controller which is a great gamepad for playing old games and wanted to get it working on my netbook. After some searching I found instructions on how to set it setting a USB controller:
su -c 'yum install joystick' su -c 'modprobe joydev' su -c 'modprobe iforce'
After that is was a simple matter of installing Gens, configuring the gamepad inputs and its done. Now I'm happily playing Teenage Mutant Turtles on my netbook using the Wii classic controller and life is good.
