Hack a Day » opengl

Hacking Wing Commander for Windows 7 Compatibility

Greg R. Jacobs — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:00:37 +0000

For everyone using a later version of Windows like Vista or Windows 7 they will probably never get to enjoy the awesomeness that was Wing Commander…until now. [Jari Komppa] has managed to use DirectDraw to his advantage and hack out a solution to this disappointing problem. He used DirectX to do this and has even managed to get OpenGL to load from a DLL after a few problems with Windows XP and Windows 7. This is truly a step forward in retro gaming. No more should we have to load a virtual machine to play Starcraft. Hopefully getting this ported to even older games such as Sim Farm or Commander Keen are on the way!

Filed under: software hacks

OpenGL on the Didj

Mike Szczys — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:00:16 +0000

[Losinggeneration] managed to get a homebrew OpenGL application working on the Didj. It’s nice to see the community driven work advance on this device but something else also caught our attention from the forum post. Another poster pointed out that [losinggeneration] has files in one of his directories called “glquake-didj” and “glquake-didj.dbg”. We hope that means a working version of Quake is on the way for the hackable handheld.

[Thanks JJ Dasher]

Filed under: handhelds hacks

Orientation aware camera

Eliot — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:01:56 +0000

[Andrew Magill] just added his Orientation Aware Camera to the Hack a Day Flickr Pool. It uses a 3-axis magnetometer and 3-axis accelerometer. He didn’t want to spend too much effort on the USB side so he picked up USBMicro’s U421. It’s a fairly well documented preprogrammed microcontroller for USB. He later regretted this; his final sample rate was only 5Hz because of all the overhead. Using the positional data the, webcam image can be corrected for any sort of shaking. [Andrew] took this one step further by using OpenGL and stitching all of the video frames together live into a full panorama. Be sure to watch his excellent video demo embedded below.

Posted in portable video hacks