Rehashing an old Mario trick

After watching the Mario movie with kids, i dropped original NES Super Mario Bros on them.  They enjoyed the new (to them) gameplay, while marveling at the limitations: you cannot go back?  With me remembering a surprising number of secrets, i got a bug in me to revive this ancient trick.  Unfortunately, i wasn’t able to get it working correctly in the limited lives i had.  Undaunted, i finally completed it just a few days later while waiting on an OS upgrade.

my favorite part was that it overflowed the numerals and became pictures when displaying the remaining lives. if you got too many extra lives, it ended the game.

Super Mario Lives - Crown Blue Square

Monitoring power usage is sometimes my only insight.

I have been working on a number of Raspberry Pi projects in various stages of working. To distract from more difficult projects (not to mention nostalgia and fun) I have been building  an Adafruit PiGrrl portable classic game emulator.  At several points with this project or other without a lot of feedback from the device I’m working with, I’ve relied on milliamp readings from the Mico USB Cable/Voltage Display.  This tiny bit of information is incredibly helpful in determining what my Pi is up too. Idle? Booting? Overwhelmed?  In the land of the blind the one eye’d man is king.  At the very least it reduced the total time waisted waiting on crashed or other broken attempts.

Micro USB amp meter

Does anyone remember how to destroy the Dark Portal?

I was replaying the classic Blizzard game Warcraft II and I couldn’t remember how to win.  It wasn’t this difficult to win the Orc campaign. Great game, I miss the 12+ hour games we’d play on our localtalk network.  It’s just not the same playing the computer.  #lanparty

Warcraft II - Dark Portal