Continuing my work updating the DCEmu sites, making sure they work properly and updating links and making new additions etc.

Today its time to look at our Joypad News site which focuses on the latest releases/news of Joypads and gaming accessories. The news is from all corners of the world and the sometimes wacky ideas released for consoles.

The site is half automated posting and the other half by me and has nearly 4 years of news on it which you can check out via the news archive on there.

Check out Joypad news here --> http://joypad-news.dcemu.co.uk/ ...

For those that absolultely can’t wait to get to experience the Oculus Rift, you can follow these plans to build your own.
MTBS3D forum user [Rfurlan] pledged in the oculus rift kickstarter (which concluded last night), but simply couldn’t wait till November/December to get his developer kit. That, and he’s probably only getting one, and who can live with only one? Since [Palmer], the creator of the oculus rift has been very open about parts, [Rfurlan] was able to compile build instructions for your very own Oculus Rift! Keep in mind though, this is only the immersive display, not the tracking component. It is also, possibly not exactly the same as the oculus, but rather the same as a recent prototype.
At one point he was having issues finding the correct lenses and [Palmer] jumped in to make some suggestions to keep things going. That’s the kind of enthusiasm that we love to see from an innovator, even when he’s in the middle of a kickstarted for the very item that [Rfurlan] is creating. This is a testament to the VR community.
Lets take a look at what makes this thing tick, and why it is such a big deal.
http://hackaday.com/2012/09/01/diy-oculus-rift-vr/
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Hackaday has seen a ton of builds make use of the Arduino CapSense library of late, so it was only a matter of time before we posted a capacitive sensing game controller that is able to move sprites around a screen.
For this build, the controller is made out of small strips of Aluminum foil, wired straight to an Arduino with a few resistors. Once embedded inside a wonderful enclosure that brings about pangs of nostalgia it’s time tow write the game.
For the game portion of the build, Processing was brought into the mix to create a SpongeBob-themed ‘capture all the jellyfish in jellyfish fields’ game. By taping the contacts for the d-pad, the player can move SpongeBob around to catch jellyfish. If you’d like to give the game a go, you can play it in your browser on the project page.
This isn’t the first – or the last – CapSense build we’ll see on Hackaday, but it is the first one dedicated to making a DIY (albeit Nintendo inspired) video game controller. If six buttons aren’t enough, you’ll just have to wait for the PS3 version.http://hackaday.com/2012/08/08/makin...acitive-touch/ ...

A brand new peripheral is threatening to eclipse the advances made by technologies such as Microsoft's Kinect.
Called Leap, the small device – which connects via USB and is about the size of a flash drive – is said by its developers to be 200x more accurate than any other motion sensing equipment on the market. It can apparently track movements down to 1/100^th of a millimetre.
It can track all ten thumbs and fingers as they interact with a 3D space (up to eight cubic feet in size) established around a user’s PC. It can also track pen movement and does an amazing job of tracking handwriting, as is seen in the video below.
It will support Windows 8 out of the box with Linux compatibility currently “on the agenda”.
Each Leap unit will retail for $69.99, with the limited initial shipments scheduled to become available this winter. Free developer kits are also being offered.

http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...hnology/028890 ...

[Tim Caswell] has been using gamepads and joysticks to demonstrate his node.js hacks for a long time. The thing is, he has been relying on C++ bindings to handle the hardware while trying to herald the praises of node.js. Why not cut out the middle man and write a joystick driver in node.js? It turns out to be so simple anyone can do it.
Granted, this is not a kernel driver. He’s relying on the Linux kernel to recognize the hardware and provide him with the customary /dev/js0 file which he can then work with. As you can see in the snippet above, he’s looping through code in order to constantly read from the hardware. To get this far he dug through the documentation for joystick packets (yay for open source!) to find that each is made of a 32-bit timestamp, a 16-bit value, and two 8-bit numbers identifying the event type and button or axis.
Once he has the packets, it’s off to the races. Each data type is parsed into an appropriate variable which you can use in the logic of your own program. Don’t be nervous, this will make a great weekend project!

http://hackaday.com/2012/08/04/node-...nux-joysticks/ ...

The Oculus Rift has caused a wave of excitement on crowd-funding site Kickstarter.
The virtual reality headset reached its target of $250,000 (£160,200) within its first four hours of going live on the site.
The gadget has gained support by some of the PC games industry’s leading figures who agreed to appear in the promotional video.
Doom creator John Carmack, Valve’s Gabe Newell and Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games, all took part in the promo video, which you can view at the Oculus Kickstarter page.
The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset promises gamers an immersive experience using a 640 by 800 pixel screen for each of the user’s eyes.


http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...r-hours/028843 ...

Oculus Rift to offer stereoscopic 3d experience

A new virtual reality headset for gaming is being taken to Kickstarter in an effort to raise $250,000 in funding for the project.
Created by Oculus, the Rift headset has been designed to produce a stereoscopic 3D experience, and claims to overcome various resolution and latency problems that have previously affected the technology.

As part of the Kickstarter, contributors will receive early development kits that include access to the Oculus Developer Centre, a community for users, and the Oculus Rift SDK that will provide code, samples and documentation.
The headset and SDK will be compatible with PCs and mobile, and the technology can be integrated into new or existing titles.
The company has said it will also be compatible with consoles in future.

http://www.develop-online.net/news/4...to-Kickstarter
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New controller from Apple similar to DualShock, will work with Apple TV

Apple

Established in 1976, Apple is a multinational corporation (corporate headquarters based in California)...

www.apple.com


Apple's move into gaming, however unpronounced, has taken a tiny step forward with a new patent. Apple's new patent filing shows a gaming controller that could very well give core gamers an alternative to touch-screen gaming and open the doors to developers to bring more sophisticated games to iOS.
The patent, which was published today after being filed in March, will link various devices such as iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs and other Apple owned hardware. The patent shows "a schematic of a video game controller for the standalone media player of [an Apple TV] or a video game system." The controller will use Radio-frequency identification (RFID) and NFC tags to connect to the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.
The move shows that Apple is increasingly working on a way to break into the gaming industry at large, perhaps without bursting into the console market. This new controller could be seen as a competitor to the rising idea of platform-agnostic games, where developers hope that games will be the driving factor in getting gamers attached, not the platform itself.
Of course, this controller is by no means a reality, and like other patents, it's entirely possible that an actual product will never be borne from it.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...ing-controller



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It’s a simple fact of gaming that controllers are more suited for shooters, while the WASD + mouse control of the PC gaming master race is more suited for real-time strategy games and MMOs. [Gabriel] wanted to challenge this idea, so he put together a controller combining the best of a mouse and keyboard for some hand-held RTS and MMO action.
The Keyball Controller as [Gabe] calls it is an amazing amalgamation of a 3rd party XBox and PS3 controllers, an SNES controller, a trackball, two USB keyboards and a ton of Bondo. The front of the Keyball features a WASD D-pad, scroll wheel, trackball, tiny keyboard and a few other commonly used buttons. The rear of the controller is loaded down with tons of trigger buttons and a few meta buttons that alter the function of other buttons.
The fabrication of the controller is absolutely phenomenal and certainly something that deserves to be copied. We’ve seen some controllers duplicated with a silicone mold and resin, so we can only hope that [Gabe] is looking at RTV silicone at the moment.
http://hackaday.com/2012/07/25/build...ller-for-mmos/ ...