Riblets

Audio Illusion

2008-09-18T14:31:00.001-07:00

AMAZING Audio Illusion - A funny movie is a click away

Mysterious Vault

2008-07-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

I've been interested in the big locked vaults at my school, heres pictures to anyone who thinks they might be able to crack it open. Apparently, the inside hasn't seen the light of day since WWII, and no one remembers the combination.

Rainy Day 2

2008-04-19T19:37:00.000-07:00

New Version now with an Installer, Customizable options, and a few new cloud textures. Click on the image to download.

Rainy Day

2008-04-14T16:39:00.001-07:00

Rainy Day is my first 10.5 Screensaver, and I'm taking full advantage of the new screen capture ability. Clouds form at the top of the screen, rain falls, and lightning hits randomly as the background slowly melts away. For 10.5 only (sorry tiger fans).

New Layout

2008-04-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

Still working out the kinks, but I needed to update this page. If I get the time, I'll start to post my projects on this page regularly.

Jointforge

2008-03-06T15:37:00.000-08:00

Jointforge Blog

Check out the project i've been working on. It's revamping is imminent as soon as I get my head around some complex mathimatical problems.

Grey Matter

2007-11-11T16:45:00.000-08:00

Posted a new screensaver called Grey Matter, Click on the image to download and test out yourself

Concorde

2007-07-10T00:38:00.001-07:00

This is a pure, relaxing flight through clouds. I used the "Flame Image" hidden patch along with a particle system to make a truely hypnotic ride into oblivion. Dedicated to the late supersonic jet.

Click on the image to download and experience for yourself
(requires a Mac with 10.4)

Making Mario Kart Track Images

2007-03-05T11:51:00.000-08:00

This How-To will get any image you want into a Mario Kart rom as a playable track. What you will need is -

- A PC (sorry Mac fans)
- ZSNES or your emulator of choice
- Super Mario Kart ROM (don't ask)
- Photoshop or another RAW image editor
- Track Designer - you can get that here, along with a lot of other amazing utilities for SNES hacking. Direct Download Link

First off, start up Track Designer and load your Mario Kart ROM. It will show the first racetrack in the list, a good starting track but not exactly what we're looking for. I like the exploratory nature of the battle tracks personally, and the AI might get a bit glitchy if we have computers mucking around our loaded track, but it's up to you. For now I picked the first battle track, which is probably the best choice because of it's lack of stuff.

Remember that you cannot change elements like where the item blocks are, these are deep within the code of the ROM along with many of the images that would be otherwise editable (like the title screen). You can however, choose another tracks data which might be helpful for certain situations.

Now that you have your track loaded, you have a few options here. You can either leave your tile selection to the gods (which can have nasty consequences) or you can go to the track designer toolbar and close to the top right put a single line of tiles in a gradient as an index to apply to the grayscale image you'll be importing.

Keep in mind that the actions of a tile within the game still apply to your track. for instance if you put grass everywhere, the Laiku guy will pick you up and drop you off at random places every time you end up in a patch.

Now export your track, and remember how many colors are in your palette if you used them. What your going to do next is trick Photoshop into thinking your track is an image file. Rename the extension from ".MKT" to ".RAW" and startup Photoshop. Navigate to the enclosing folder and open your track file as a RAW file. A dialog will come up setting dimensions and the header.
Now your in business, set the options shown here, with 128 x 128 and a header of 1 byte.

An image of the track you exported should be seen now. If there are any dialogs about changing the header, deny at all costs especially on saving from now on. Each color represents a certain block as you might have guessed. If you didn't follow my earlier suggestion of making a palette of colors, disregard the next few steps.

Zoom into the area where you put your palette and make a selection box around your colors. Copy and Paste these into a separate document so it's easier to access from now on. Now take the image you'll be using.

De-saturate your image it when your comfortable with it's contrast. Unless you've got only 2 tiles, keep a certain amount of grayscale.

Scale it down to exactly 126 x 126. I've found that if I copy over all the edge data, I get some pretty nasty effects that don't allow me to reimport. You should have 3 images up, your track, the image you want to import, and your palette

Posterize your grayscale image to the amount of colors you have in your palette. Now this next step is quite time consuming but I couldn't find a better way. Color range each color you have in your image (with a fuzzyness of zero) and replace with the corresponding palette color.

<-- This is around what your should have now.

From this point on, it's as easy as copying and pasting your image to the track canvas. Center and save it as a raw file, preserving the header. Now just change ".RAW" back to ".MKT" and load it back into your ROM with track designer using "Save Track to ROM" (Battle Track 1 is index number 16).

Your ROM should be ready for playing, load it up in an Emulator and check it out.

Tutorial by Aaron Brewer

2007-02-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

Heres a video I put togeather for my Interface Design class

Hello

2007-02-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

My name is Aaron Brewer, I am an Interactive Media Major at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. This Blog is focused on all the things I'm working on and what I'm interested in. Sorry this is only a short introduction at the moment but I'll post my work in the following week.